


Business Meetings

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-14
Updated: 2012-09-14
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:20:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 31,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco leads a powerful group of vampires. Harry is their Ministry-appointed negotiator. Cue a series of once-monthly meetings where Harry and Draco argue about the various virtues of attacking the Ministry versus holding back from doing so, and, eventually, other things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Ministry's Compromise

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic with very short chapters, and a deliberately constrained setting throughout most of it.

_Chapter One--The Ministry's Compromise_

"I'm here under protest."

"Not the best beginning to a meeting such as this," Draco pointed out mildly, and leaned back on his chair, arranging his arms and lifting his head so that he would expose his heart and throat. Hopefully, Potter would have to prove he was still a hero, and that would rid Draco of both a long-standing rival and a Ministry impediment at the same time.

Potter only shook his head and leaned back in the chair that Draco had provided for him, made of cold black stone like his, but smaller. "Of course you would have a throne," he said. "Like Voldemort in a lot of things, aren't you?"

Draco felt himself shudder with the name, and hated himself for doing so, and hated Potter for seeing. He let his lips draw back from his fangs. Potter smiled back and then looked around the room of his mansion Draco had chosen for them to meet in.

Draco had no trouble seeing it with a stranger's eyes, since he had chosen the decor of his rooms mostly to impress, not for comfort. What need had a vampire for comfort, except the kind that came through the mouth? The marble walls, the gold-encrusted furniture, the dim torches sputtering in platinum sconces on the walls, the tiles covering the floors that winked with rubies and diamonds on the edges, had done a good job so far of intimidating the werewolves and other vampires who had come to negotiate with him and his flock, and with the sole Ministry representative who had ventured this far.

Of course, he realized a moment later, it did him little good when what he should be seeing with were _Potter's_ eyes.

"Lots of stone," Potter commented, letting his eyes roam the walls and then drop down to the tiles. "And gemstone. Lots of big, hard things." He paused thoughtfully. "Compensating for something, Malfoy?"

Draco forced himself to hold still and not react, and to open his nostrils further. Potter had keen senses for a human--all those trained by the Aurors did--but it was nothing to Draco's ability to smell emotions and hear heartbeats.

But as he had not seen with Potter's eyes until he remembered who he was talking to, he had not felt with Potter's emotions. He heard a heartbeat slightly slower than human normal. He smelled dust and fire, boredom and smoldering anger. No fear.

"If you're here under protest," Draco said, and pitched his voice to echo from the walls, "you could leave again. Not hard, is it?"

Potter flashed him a smile. "The one thing in this room that isn't," he agreed, and slung one leg over the other. "But no, seriously, I'm here for the exact reason I told you. The Ministry would like nothing better than to kill you. A large flock of vampires with a powerful leader who retained his wizard abilities post-transformation? Bad news. I convinced them not to move too hastily, and then they gave me the task of glorified babysitter." He sighed. "So I come to you once a month, and tell you off for being a bad, bad vampire, and you snarl at me, and I go back to the Ministry and tell them that in my perception you're no immediate threat. Then everybody goes to bed happy." He paused. "Or to their coffins happy, I suppose."

"No immediate threat," Draco said, and tilted his head forwards again. "I think that is the most insulting thing you've said so far."

"Well. If you need to be _convinced_..." Potter leaned back, and Draco watched the smooth line of his neck tilt, watched the pulse come into view, looked at the fragile line of collarbone that seemed to say Potter had gained no weight since Hogwarts, despite developing muscles. "Come on, then."

Draco was flashing across the room while Potter's mouth still moved on the words. He leaped gracefully so as to land draping Potter's body with his own and with his mouth positioned firmly against Potter's neck--

And found Potter's wand against his ribs, at the angle that would strike a spell between them and explode the rotted mass that comprised his heart. Draco paused and then pulled his head back, turning it slightly so his fangs scraped the air above Potter's skin.

"No human moves that fast," he whispered. "What are you?"

Potter gave him a tired smile. "Not a werewolf or a vampire, if that's what you're thinking. You would have smelled it on me when I came in, wouldn't you?"

He paused, and Draco realized he was giving Draco time to nod. Reluctant though he was to give Potter credence for any of his ridiculous theories, he did. He couldn't allow Potter to doubt his abilities.

"I'm just a fast human with a lot of training, and a lot of experience anticipating what Dark wizards are going to do." Potter shifted, and nudged Draco in the thigh with one knee. Draco flowed off him, never taking his eyes from Potter's face. "And you don't need the trouble you would stir up by killing me. The Ministry can afford to lose a lot of negotiators, and there are some people there who think they could stand to lose me, but the wizarding world would demand they hunt you down."

"It might be worth it," Draco whispered, swaying nearer again so he could see what Potter would do.

A sharp little flame sprang up on the edge of Potter's wand in response. Draco fell back with a hiss. He knew that no ordinary fire would have that particular glare, that particular glow. This was sunlight.

Potter dismissed the sun-flame and cocked his head. "Really?"

_No_ , Draco had to concede. When he became lord of the flock, he had put aside the temptation to follow old grudges, because the most important thing was the survival of all those minds he could feel pushing at his own, the minds that would be like starving stray dogs if he let go of them. He had formed the flock in the first place to stop the Ministry from destroying vampires, from destroying _him_. He was stronger with more of his kind around him.

And he wouldn't risk dissipating that strength simply to kill one of the Ministry's strengths. Besides, Potter was preferable to someone who stank of fear, if he must let a human visit his den and walk away each time.

"Very well," he said aloud. "I will expect you next month. On the third?"

"Works for me." Potter stood and nodded to him. "Good luck to you, Malfoy. You're more civilized than I expected."

"Living up to and past your standards is not difficult."

That won a faint smile from Potter. "Probably true," he said, and turned and left the dark room. Draco closed his eyes, focused his ears, and listened to him threading his way back through the rooms to the outside world, obviously remembering his path despite the dim lighting and negotiating them only once.

Yes, if Draco _must_ speak with someone each month, someone as powerful, intelligent, and arrogant as himself was preferable.


	2. Strong in the Darkness

_Chapter Two—Strong in the Darkness_  
  
Harry sighed as he walked into Malfoy’s throne room and saw him sitting upright like some Egyptian decoration. He didn’t really want to be here, not when he had already put in a long day of tracking, fighting, recovering from a few of his injuries in hospital, and filing paperwork related to the case.  
  
But it was the third of the month, and the Ministry flunkey assigned to convey messages had been apologetic with wet eyes. Harry knew what that meant. The Ministry _was_ capable of deciding that they had been too tolerant and killing Malfoy’s flock despite their promises, because one of the privileges the Ministry reserved to itself was the ability to change its mind.  
  
 _And you’re thinking about it like it’s a particularly bitchy person instead of the organization you work for,_ Harry thought with a shake of his head, and flopped gracelessly into his chair. A moment later, he winced. He’d banged his hip against the side of the seat, and that made the wounds low on his back, along his spine, flare up. The Healers would take him apart if he had torn them open again, but when Harry paused and concentrated on his skin, he couldn’t feel the trickle of blood.  
  
And it was a stony expression Malfoy faced him with, not the hunting dog’s eagerness that Harry knew blood gave to vampires. He nodded once when he looked at Harry and then went back to staring above his head.  
  
“Here I am,” Harry said. If he leaned to the side and crossed his legs, the wounds hurt less. He still wished he could cast a Cushioning Charm, but he would only draw his wand here if he meant it. “Was there anything you wanted to say to me?”  
  
“What was your opinion of the new anti-vampire legislation passed in the Wizengamot yesterday?” Malfoy had mastered letting his voice boom out from different directions, without moving his lips. _That must be the height of ambition with him,_ Harry thought. _After all, he_ did _so wish to resemble a marble statue, and now he doesn’t have to look like he’s speaking, either._  
  
“Is that what your spies told you it was?” Harry laughed and leaned even a little more to the side. Malfoy’s eyes fixed on him, but nothing else moved. Well, it wasn’t like a vampire needed to breathe, was it. “It’s not. It doesn’t tighten the registry restrictions or target flocks like yours that don’t live right next to humans. It _does_ say that the parents of any child caught in a relationship with a vampire will be fined, and sent to Azkaban if it can be proven that they sold their child to the vampire.”  
  
Malfoy showed his fangs then. Harry shook his head as he looked at them. Slender and deadly, bright ivory needles, but still not as white as Malfoy would need them to be to complete the marble statue impersonation. Then again, neither was his hair.  
  
“It restricts the willing choices of young bloods,” Malfoy said. “Both vampire and wizard.”  
  
Harry snorted. “It seems pretty bloody simple to me. Don’t let your flock bite children, and report any parents who try to sell them to you to the Ministry.”  
  
“It is the first wall imposed on our will,” Malfoy said, or the ceiling appeared to say with his voice. “There will come more. We will run into them, and our people will mourn and lament.”  
  
“Maybe you _should_ have been an actor instead of a vampire,” Harry said, and leaned back in his chair, conjuring a stool with his wand in his pocket. Malfoy whipped one arm around in front of his body as the stool appeared, then subsided. Harry chuckled and put his feet on it. It was good to see that Malfoy’s statue impersonation was even less successful than he thought it was. “Then you could make your ridiculous declamations and have people stand a chance of believing them.”  
  
Malfoy leaned forwards now, apparently having decided that as long as he had broken his stillness, he might as well break it in style. “Did you know,” he murmured, “that it would cost me less than two seconds to snap your neck, Potter?”  
  
Harry grinned at him. “Why so long?”  
  
Malfoy went still again, then resumed his posture with his arms on the arms of the throne. “I have counted,” he said. “It is always better to understand your own abilities than to overestimate them, especially when you have enemies who would be happy to see you do so.”  
  
“That’s true,” Harry said, “and the first good sense I’ve heard you speak.” He yawned, and didn’t miss the way Malfoy tensed. “I ought to let you know,” he murmured, closing his eyes and tilting his head back so that his throat deliberately showed, “that I can burn a vampire’s eyes out in _less_ than two seconds.”  
  
“And you have often had occasion to test this?”  
  
Harry opened one eye. _Well._ That was the first time he had heard that particular throbbing snarl in his voice, as though Malfoy could care about vampires other than himself. Harry wondered idly if he knew that it made him more attractive than all the posing and imitation of stone in the world could possibly have done.  
  
 _Not that he would care about being attractive to a human. Not when he thinks mostly about snapping their necks and drinking their blood._  
  
“I killed two vampires who came after me,” Harry answered, “and one that was threatening someone else.”  
  
“How do you know it was threatening someone else?” Malfoy coiled to the edge of the throne. Harry blinked as he watched him, more in fascination than anything else. He moved like a cross between a snake and a cat. “It could have been a consensual blood contract, like the kind that the Ministry professes to value and refuses to honor.”  
  
“Backing up to the edge of the cliff and threatening to throw her off if she didn’t get the blood she wanted from her was pretty convincing,” Harry said.  
  
Malfoy tilted his head to the side, reminding Harry right now of a curious dog. He decided Malfoy would hate the comparison, which meant he needed to use it someday. “You still could have misunderstood something. You know nothing of the niceties of vampire behavior.”  
  
“No, nothing beyond what I learned in my Auror courses,” Harry admitted. “Which were mostly what you looked like and how to defeat you.”  
  
Malfoy’s lips slid back from his fangs again.  
  
“On the other hand,” Harry added, “when the choice is possibly watch a murder happen myself because the vampire facing me might not understand I’m a sodding _Auror_ and it needs to put the victim down, or get the vampires a bit upset, then I know which one I’m going to choose.”  
  
Malfoy let his eyelids fall over his eyes as he peered at Harry. Harry cocked his head back in response. _Hey, if Malfoy can do it, so can I._  
  
“What?” he asked.  
  
“You don’t consider killing a vampire murder,” Malfoy said. “But you intervened to protect my flock from the Ministry.”  
  
Harry sighed. “Not this again,” he complained. “I’ve already dealt with enough people today who think that any time we have to kill a Dark wizard is murder. We’d already warned him, and I already warned this vampire. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to _do_ if the choice comes down to the killer and the innocent victim. I hate killing, I don’t like it, but I’ll do it. If I didn’t, I think you’d despise me more for it.”  
  
“Then you treat vampires like humans,” Malfoy said.  
  
Harry shrugged. “Not exactly. That would be stupid, when you’re stronger and faster than we are. But morally alike, yeah.”  
  
Malfoy turned his head to the side, and a weird noise emerged from his throat. The only sound Harry could compare it to was a burbling purr.  
  
He blinked, shook his head, and stood. He knew he had spent too much time around vampires when he started thinking of Malfoy as a big, cuddly kitty-cat, which meant it was time to leave his presence. “So. Same day next month?”  
  
“It is rare to find an Auror who will treat us like that,” Malfoy said, still staring at him.  
  
“I know,” Harry said shortly. “But I’ve never done things just because other people will approve of me for them, you know that.”  
  
“Mmm.” Malfoy closed his eyes. “But we could still use an Auror who would understand the social niceties of vampire interaction and when they might be interrupting a consensual contract.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “When you find one, let me know. I’d like to be relieved of this duty.” He turned to leave the room, making sure not to limp. God alone knew what Malfoy would do if he saw that.  
  
“Potter.”  
  
As far as Harry knew, the enchantments that vampires could use on their victims by looking them in their eyes or singing their names to them didn’t work on him, the same way the Imperius Curse didn’t. But he paused and looked back when he heard that word in that voice, and he didn’t have to.  
  
Malfoy stared at him, eyes sparking like hematite.  
  
“Until we find an Auror who understands everything important about us,” Malfoy said precisely, “one like you will do very well.”  
  
Harry knew that statement didn’t deserve a grin and a wave of his hand, as though Malfoy was an ordinary friend he was saying good-bye to. But he gave it anyway, because he wanted to.  
  
“See you next month,” he murmured, but at least he said that to himself and not Malfoy.  
  
A chuckle followed him anyway, riding the edge of hearing, peculiarly suited to the dim magnificence Harry glimpsed on the edge of the firelight.


	3. After the Kill

_Chapter Three—After the Kill_

Draco could feel the rasp of dried blood beneath his fingernails as he sat down on the throne. He lifted his hand to his mouth and darted out his tongue to reach the flakes just as Potter came into the room.

For one moment, Draco felt the impulse to freeze, but he put it aside and lowered his hand to stare at Potter instead. Potter nodded to him and strode to his own chair, not smelling surprised or impressed or anything else that Draco would have expected him to. His eyes were narrow and glowing, his stride careless and sure. He flung himself into the chair with enough force to make it shake.

“You are not as happy to be here, this time,” Draco concluded, letting his tongue extend towards his nails again.

Potter didn’t seem to notice the remarkable length of a vampire’s tongue. Indeed, when Draco glanced at him again, he saw that he had his head leaning back, his busy hand rubbing at the nape of his neck. Draco saw the pulse, and had to look away. “No. You can _fucking_ say that, Malfoy.” He didn’t bark when he laughed, he didn’t roar, but the intriguing sound he made was somewhere in between the two.

“Tell me,” Draco said, and finished cleaning the blood. Dried, it had a dusty taste, more like rust than iron, but his body still opened to welcome it, and he could feel his veins twitching in wonder and appreciation. “What happened?”

“The Ministry made another threat against your flock directly to me.” Potter made a sharp, disgusted noise and rocked his chair forwards until it grated and slid on the stone. “As if my agreeing to become your negotiator isn’t enough? What else do they _want_ from me?”

“Perhaps,” Draco said, because he knew such tactics worked with Gryffindors, “you could consider what the threat would mean to _us_ , instead of you.”

There was a pause, and Potter’s throat worked. Then, to Draco’s secret flaring of his nostrils, he dropped his arm and nodded. “There’s that. You’re right.” He focused on Draco then, and frowned. “Someone tried to strangle you?”

Potter’s sight was keener than Draco had thought, if he could make out the fading, silver-white bruises on the skin of Draco’s throat from that distance. He would remember that if he ever needed to kill him. “Tried to force me to my knees and drink from me,” he corrected Potter. “That would be what a vampire tries to do when he’s tired of being ruled and thinks he can claim his freedom.”

Potter’s throat worked again. Then he said, “I take it he’s dead?”

“Will you call killing a vampire murder when I do it, then?” Draco turned his hand and licked at an imaginary patch of blood on the heel of his palm, purely for Potter’s benefit. “An interesting definition of terms you have.”

“I’m thinking about how that death might affect the Ministry’s perception of your flock’s strength.”

Draco paused. Then he showed his fangs. “Potter,” he said, making his voice exquisite, lengthening the sounds and adding the death-croon that most only heard in the moments immediately before a vampire struck, “if you are about to suggest that the Ministry would easily take down my flock because they perceive it as weak, thanks to the death of a single member, then you should know your death would be the first.” He might not be able to take Potter by himself, but all he had to do was let the straining minds in the back of his own slip the leash.

Potter shook his head. His eyes were clear now, and he sat upright, and his scent filled Draco’s nostrils with the quiver of excitement that caused him to suppress his twitching. The sight of Potter so attentive filled a hunger in Draco older and deeper than the one for blood, one that made him feel human again.

“I mean that _they_ might think they can,” Potter said. “And that you would have to kill someone then, and the Ministry might, _again_ , start campaigning to simply eliminate the lot of you.”

Draco lifted his head and showed off the tips of his fangs this time, letting his lips descend over the rest. Potter was not the threat himself. “You have no idea how many vampires I command.”

“Sixty-five,” Potter said.

And there was no hesitation, and there was no hemming and hawing and pretending, and there was no sensation of Legilimency against the borders of his mind, which together were the negatives that made Draco flash down and into being before Potter’s chair, leaning over him, his fangs an inch above the top of Potter’s head.

Potter looked at him without moving, but there was a scent around him, like a brushfire smoldering, that told Draco he wouldn’t have to. He wondered, because he had to wonder, if he would taste Potter’s magic if he drank his blood.

“You will tell me,” Draco whispered. “You will tell me how you know that.”

“Sorry, but the way you enchant your victims doesn’t work on me,” Potter said, still staring at him with bright eyes.

Draco kept his mouth still. Otherwise, he probably _would_ try to bite, for the pleasure of seeing those eyes glaze, Potter’s mouth fall open, his hands uncurl and his body slump back along the throne…

“And I’m a predator, just like you,” Potter continued quietly, “only one who seeks to protect, and not to hurt. I value both human and vampire lives, as long as they aren’t doing something that makes me aware they don’t value others. Step back, Malfoy. I’m only the messenger, not the enemy. The Ministry has a spy in your ranks, yes. Surely you have some inside the Ministry.”

Draco stepped back, moving his body but not his eyes. “I could attack tonight,” he said. “Not you, I would not kill you. But some of those who threaten me, I would.”

“I appreciate that for the gracious gesture it is,” Potter murmured. “Sparing someone who might be a danger is quite a gift, for a vampire.”

“I would not kill you because I want the knowledge,” Draco said. “Give me the name of the Ministry’s spy.”

Potter nodded. “In return, I want the name of the vampire you killed.”

Draco paused, but he doubted, in the end, that it mattered. The Ministry spy had probably already reported the incident where Draco had killed his challenger, along with the exact number of his kind in the flock. His throat grew hot, but he fought back the urge to lengthen his fangs, and inclined his head. “Duncan,” he said.

“Duncan,” Potter said.

It took Draco a moment to realize that Potter had not simply echoed him to fix the name in his memory. He took a step back and studied Potter in profile, committing the lines of nose and chin and lips to memory. Polyjuice could give a human the form of another’s face, but not the exact, small gestures and expressions of the kind that a vampire could notice. “You would swear to it?”

Potter laid his hand on his wand, but he had gone so slowly that Draco knew it was not meant as a threat. “I swear on my magic. Duncan was the Ministry spy as well as the one who challenged you. I reckon he thought he’d got away with the spying act for so long, he might as well take control of the flock, too.”

Draco nodded. He had noticed the changes in Duncan’s scent months ago, as well as the changes in the tremors of Duncan’s leash in his mind, but he had thought it merely indicated that his lieutenant was preparing to challenge him.

He had exiled himself from the human world after his death. It occurred to him, as it had done after each of Potter’s visits, that he needed to pay more attention to matters outside his flock. Not everything they did related solely to their own affairs, any more than the rising of the sun and moon was without effect on the world below.

“You won’t need to fear much retribution from the Ministry for now, I don’t think,” Potter said, standing. “They won’t dare attack without more exact information than they received from him—because he bargained with them to release it slowly, of course—and they can’t accuse of you murdering a Ministry ally when they would have to explain how they knew. If I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”

“Strange,” Draco said.

Potter, about to leave the room, paused, but didn’t glance back. “What?”

“That you speak about the Ministry as if you were not part of them.”

Potter turned then and showed his teeth. Draco flashed his fangs back immediately, but of course Potter didn’t understand that as a vampire dominance gesture and therefore didn’t grasp the conflict he’d almost precipitated.

“Some of them don’t like me for my fame,” Potter said. “Some for my stubbornness, some for my blood, some for my refusal to be manipulated.”

“All of those are reasons that _I_ would find to value you,” Draco murmured. “Especially your blood, oh yes.” He could imagine the way it would leap to life in his mouth, like a supernova.

Potter laughed this time and shook his head. “Well, you’ve at least reminded me there’s another kind of blood politics. I’ll keep that pun in mind the next time they’re discussing me as if they think half-bloods have hearing problems.” He raised his hand and turned away, walking through the dark as confidently as always.

Draco noticed a last brand of Duncan’s blood on his palm, and licked it off without taking his eyes from Potter’s turned back and steady steps.

All the while, he was imagining a different taste to the blood on his tongue, and not simply because this patch was dry.

 


	4. When In Doubt

“It’s the third.”

So the same wet-eyed flunkey they sent to him two months ago had said this time, and that meant it was Harry’s job to heave himself, bump-thump, along the path that led to Malfoy’s house and through the rooms to the cold lair he kept.

Harry gritted his teeth and swore under his breath as his leg dragged on the floor. He wanted to pause and rest, but the vampire who opened the door for him had stared at him with blue eyes that had more than a hint of grey in them and said, “The Lord is waiting for you.” So on he went, and the stupid leg that had chosen to get itself wounded by a stray curse could just drag behind him.

He paused outside the throne room and adjusted the hang of his cloak. Too much to hope that Malfoy wouldn’t smell the dried blood on his skin. He hadn’t had time to clean up before he was summoned. What Harry could do was make sure that he carried this off _magnificently,_ so much so that other people would pause and goggle at him when they heard of it.

So he strode into the room, looking neither left nor right, and made his way to his chair first. Then he turned around and looked up at Malfoy’s throne, half-prepared to bow already.

Malfoy wasn’t there.

Harry paused, aware of his living heart filling his ears with blood and buzz and sound. Then he moved to the left.

He was in time to avoid one arm that came down trying to pin him, but not the other, which snaked around his shoulders and then his chest and tugged him in close. Harry bowed his head and rammed his forehead into Malfoy’s inner arm. He might as well not have. Malfoy might not feign being marble well, but his skin did.

Bleeding from the forehead, dazed, bruised, Harry heard Malfoy inhale and then whisper in his ear, “Tell me why I should not eat you.”

“Because they would get some infinitely more annoying Auror to replace me,” Harry said, staring into the darkness. He wobbled, but Malfoy held him upright. It was even kind of nice to have someone to lean on, considering his leg.

He banished _that_ thought as soon as he realized he was having it and added, “They were talking about it today. They’re not satisfied that I haven’t brought you down in a hail of fire yet. Someone else would probably bring about the conflict between your flock and the Ministry a lot more efficiently.”

There was a pause, and then Malfoy turned him around. Harry went with it easily now that he knew what to expect, and cast a nonverbal Cleaning Charm on the way, to remove the blood from his skin. Malfoy sniffed him, next to his cheek and then his throat, and kept his mouth there while he spoke. “And you think I value your life enough to spare it?”

“I only know that I’ve survived three meetings so far, and that you seemed to want to keep your flock out of the fire,” Harry retorted, balanced in a way that would let him burn the hell out of Malfoy before he died. “If you kill me, you kill yourself too, and leave your flock leaderless and ready for a negotiator who can work the new leader like a Legilimens. That would be a bad thing.”

“Still thinking you can burn me before I drain you dry,” Malfoy whispered, and nuzzled in so that Harry could sense the edges of his fangs the way he would sense a wall in a dark room before he banged into it. “You are intolerably _cute_ , Potter.”

Harry grinned, and poised himself. Malfoy shifted his muscles, and that weird purr-croon came bubbling out of his throat.

Harry lunged.

Malfoy’s arm that wasn’t around his shoulders seized his hand and pinned it to his side, his wand pointing down along his ribs. Harry heard the warning creak of the wood and knew that Malfoy might break his wand. He froze.

“That’s better,” Malfoy said, and his voice darkened and deepened to the point that Harry wouldn’t have been surprised to hear night speak in a tone like it. “Now. Why should I spare you? You came in here weak and limping, smelling of blood. The Ministry tossed you my way like a gift.”

“And you should know that the Ministry only gives poisoned meat,” Harry murmured, eyes half-closed, flexing his muscles in small twitches to test the strength of the vampire’s hold that he knew Malfoy would feel. “So ask yourself why I came in here like a gift, and you’ll find the answer to your first question.”

Malfoy paused. Then he drew his head back. His eyes met Harry’s.

Harry stared into them, into swirling grey and black, and held his position. No matter how long Malfoy looked at him, he was still in the middle of a throne room being held by a vampire who felt like a granite spider, not falling into an abyss of pleasure or whatever Malfoy wanted him to be.

“Why are you resistant to this?” Malfoy whispered.

Harry tried to shrug, but Malfoy’s arms held him too firmly for that, so he did his best to answer lightly. “For the same reason that I’m resistant to the Imperius Curse, I think. I’m too stubborn. Someone tries to tell me that it would be a good idea to do what they order me to, and I don’t think it is.”

Malfoy laughed, a noise like dust choking, and released him. Harry turned, keeping Malfoy in view as he walked towards the throne. Malfoy paused near the bottom step and cocked his head at Harry.

“You should have known better than to come here wounded,” he said. “You should have known what a temptation you would be to me, and you had no way of knowing whether I had fed recently or not. I could have ripped you to pieces for the heat in your veins before considering the political consequences.”

“Again with the over-confidence and the big talking,” Harry said, shaking his head. “You can’t fool me. Would someone who can’t place other needs above his hunger have become the leader of a flock of vampires strong enough to worry the Ministry? Would someone who’s heard my warnings dump them all by the wayside and spring on me without considering _all_ the consequences?”

Malfoy stared at him for a moment, his fangs retracting. “I don’t know whether you’re complimenting or insulting me,” he said at last.

“I leave that as an exercise for the listener,” Harry said, and gave him a small bow. The rush in his veins was enough to obscure the pain in his leg. It wasn’t often a vampire or even some of the people he worked with would unbend like this, which made the consideration a gift.

Like the gift Malfoy had already given him, of saying that Harry was the best Auror he could imagine as their negotiator until a properly-trained one came along.

He looked back up to find Malfoy utterly still, poised on the edge of what seemed to be a scent trail. “What?” Harry asked.

“You weren’t lying,” Malfoy whispered. “You feel honored to be here. You are _capable_ of feeling honored to be here.”

 _I should have known he would smell my emotions._ Harry nodded with a faint smile. “I did try to tell you that I treated humans and vampires alike unless they were trying to kill someone.”

Malfoy half-lowered his head as if to guard his throat. “I did just try to kill you.”

“You threatened,” Harry said. “You didn’t try. I have the feeling I would have known if you tried.”

Malfoy smiled this time the way that humans might smile, although of course his fangs still projected and Harry would have been stupid to forget who and what he faced. “You are a temptation, then,” he said. “In other ways than just the blood.”

Harry put his eyebrows up, but Malfoy didn’t explain what he meant, and Harry decided not to pursue it. “So,” he said, shifting around and looking at his chair over his shoulder. “What do you want to discuss?”

“This month? Nothing.” Malfoy licked his bottom lip, and Harry found himself waiting for him to lick the upper, but it didn’t come. “You have given me enough to think about, including the vague hints of news you dispensed.”

“I haven’t heard anything solid, such as a date the Ministry might prepare to move against you,” Harry said softly. “I would have told you that.”

“I know,” Malfoy said, and his voice grew—strange. Not the burble-purr, but deep in another way. “That is what makes you so valuable.”

Harry thought he knew, then. Malfoy meant he was an actual channel to share information, not an Auror who would keep it to himself whether or not he should, simply because he hated all vampires. He nodded and flashed Malfoy a smile. “Then take care, Malfoy, and I’ll see you next month.”

“Use a salve that contains comfrey on your leg,” Malfoy said. “Or I will know.” He stepped into the shadows that seemed to cluster around the throne and was gone.

“Comfrey’s less offensive to your nostrils than my natural scent, right?” Harry called after him.

“Wrong,” said the voice that could come from everywhere and nowhere.

Harry went, blinking, and off-balance in more ways than one.


	5. Turning and Turnings

Draco lay back on the throne with his eyes closed. His senses curled through the air, seeking and finding, bringing and dragging closer.

The thick scent of fire. Dust. Something like rainwater, something that had taken Draco longer than it should have to connect with the appearance of wetness on someone’s cheeks. And a swirling wind to stir it all.

Potter was not coming quietly.

He sat up and leaned forwards as Potter stepped into the room, then froze where he was. Potter smelled no different, his emotions still dancing around him in currents so thick they were practically visible. But when he looked up and saw Draco, those emotions intensified until Draco regretted the breath he would have to draw in to speak.

And not only because, breathing made it harder for him to smell the blood that thrummed beneath Potter’s skin.

“You have come here for more reasons than because it is the third of the month,” he said.

Potter nodded. “Yes.” He strode over to his chair without taking his eyes off Draco. Draco watched the roll of the muscles in his leg, the way that his stride accomplished exactly what it was meant to as far as the length of the steps was concerned, and felt his muscles smooth down in response. Potter had used the comfrey as he was told to.

That he would take orders was another point in his favor, and Draco saw no reason to speak to the Ministry about a more highly-trained Auror.

“Tell me, then,” Draco said. He had sharpened his voice until the command emerged like a flint arrowhead, and it appeared to strike Potter as hard. He closed his eyes for a moment before he sat down, and the invisible storm around him—invisible to all but a vampire’s senses, that was—rose higher, until it towered over him like a cloud with lightning at its heart.

Draco twisted his head to the side. Someone who could take orders was an asset, yes, but Draco did not wish it to go too far. There was no Potter-leash quivering in his mind that bound him to the man as his others bound him to his flock, and he did not wish there to be. Potter’s yielding was worthless if done out of sheer languor, irritation, or anything but the most willing fixation on Draco.

“All right,” Potter whispered. “I did something that was—probably stupid. No, I _know_ it was stupid. But I executed every step of the plan knowing that. And I know that you’ll want someone to replace me as negotiator.”

“No one can,” Draco said. “The Ministry won’t waste anyone in a position they think as worthless as this one.” He did not bother to point out the other reason: that the Ministry had created this position in the first place as a punishment for Potter.

“If you ask for someone else?” Potter forced his eyes open and met his gaze in the moment before his face slanted away.

Last month, that would have pleased Draco. Now, the thought that Potter would look away for some other reason than because Draco’s eyes and will were too much for him made his chest cramp with the pressure of his rage.

He kept still. He had learned how to keep still early on, when it meant the difference between blood and hunger. This might be a difference that mattered as much, in the end. “Tell me what you did,” he said.

Potter sighed and crossed his legs. Still no difference in the pull of the muscles when he did that, Draco noted. Good. He had given Potter his advice for a reason. “I—looked up records,” he said. “From the war.”

“The Ministry Archives have no information on me or my flock.” Draco had made sure of that in the time he sent Orton, the youngest of his vampires, to seduce the current Archivist.

“Not now,” Potter admitted. “They have older records on some of you, if you know where to look for the information.” He hesitated, then added, “Such as records from approximately eight years ago, when the war was, everyone thought, over and people were traveling back home.”

Draco stood. He didn’t rush down from the throne, because he had done that before, and Potter would now expect the motion. He looked, and Potter glanced aside again. The emotion that swirled around him this time was the choking hot dust Draco had already sniffed once before. Shame. He had rarely smelled it so strong.

Draco came down the steps of the throne, but slowly. He could be a leopard, springing after his prey. He could also be a wolf, tracking it with endurance. Potter drew himself up and ducked his head.

“Tell me what you did,” Draco said, for the third time, and held the demand out on the air like a noose.

Potter walked into it. The sound of his gulp cut through the room, and then he was hanging, his shame suspended enough to obey. It was not such a first taste of his obedience as Draco had promised himself, but there were other first tastes to come. He stood at the bottom of the steps and watched Potter.

“I found the vampire who turned you,” Potter said. “Older vampire, called himself Yacinth at that point. He kept you for three months, didn’t he? Enough time to break you, he thought, and then you managed to get away when one of his meals turned out to be harder to subdue than he thought. He won, but by that point, he was weakened and had lost control of you. And you found your wand and became a wizard again.”

Draco moved a step closer. If Potter had brought the vampire in, subjected him to trial, and others would learn the circumstances of those three months and the cold and the rush of dark waters closing over his head and the _hunger_ —

“I killed him,” Potter said. “I locked him in a box and starved him for three nights, and then I tied him out under the sunrise.”

Draco paused. The words swayed through him like a breeze swaying through leaves. He stepped back.

Potter turned to him, and now the fire was visible in his eyes as well as his scent, and he had no trouble meeting Draco’s eyes, or holding his will, or obeying the order to speak the truth. “I knew that you’d hate me for it. If you left him alive this long, either you wanted him alive, or you wanted to find him and kill him yourself one day. But I did it. I read the records, and I talked to—someone who knew what it would probably be like for a new vampire that just got turned for a lark, and then I killed him.”

Draco took a step nearer again.

Potter drew his wand.

Draco let his hiss build slowly, wavering up and down the scale before it became a croon. He moved nearer again, and Potter jerked his wand into fighting stance. Draco raised his hand slowly, making sure every movement could be seen, and laid his fingers along Potter’s wrist.

The pulse rebounding under his touch nearly broke his concentration.

“What?” Potter demanded, and pulled him back.

Draco let his nostrils flare open in an obvious sniff, but with his head this far away from Potter’s throat, he didn’t smell everything that he wanted to. That was no hardship, not when Potter’s emotions and sweat once again carried him high, not when the sound of Potter’s heartbeat filled Draco with dizzying, dancing joy.

“You did that for me,” Draco said. “Not because it would place you higher in the Ministry. Not because Yacinth was a personal enemy. Not because it would give you some standing with the flock. You thought it _wouldn’t_. You thought I would hate you forever, and you still did it.”

Potter sneered this time. He should know better than that, Draco thought. He had no fang to display. “Yes. That’s the reason I know you’re going to turn your back on me.” He reached into his pocket, and as he already had his wand out, Draco let him. “Here’s a list of Aurors you could ask the Ministry to replace me and have a chance of getting. Most of them are good.”

He fell silent as Draco came closer, never pressing in more than a pace or two. He didn’t need to. He could feel Potter’s emotions on his skin, taste the warmth, see the pulse fluttering in his throat, hear it in his wrist, smell the blood. Potter turned with him as Draco trod a circle around him, and still his heart beat and his blood crooned back and his skin called Draco.

“You did that for me,” Draco said.

Potter’s mouth crimped, ending the sneer. “Yeah. Are you saying that—you’re _not_ angry?”

“I forgot Yacinth,” Draco said. “I would have remembered him someday and paid the debt, but you did it.” He paused then, and bent his head towards Potter without moving his body. “For me.”

Potter nodded, once, mouth crimping even more, eyes dark.

“You will do other things,” Draco breathed, voice stroking Potter as his hands and fangs could not. “For me. When you want to do them.”

He stepped back and watched Potter. This time, Potter could not meet his eyes again, but this time, it was not shame.

“You want me to stay on as negotiator,” Potter said. He tried to make it a question, but he couldn’t, not when he could read, in his own way, what thrummed between them as well as Draco could.

“I want you to,” Draco said. “And you will.”

Potter stared at him, then shook his head. “I didn’t know vampires cared that much about—wanting.”

Draco said nothing. Surely Potter would figure it out, the rarity of a vampire taking a victim who was completely willing rather than in need of money or hypnotized by their eyes, and remember what value rarity added.

“I,” Potter said, and ran his hand through his hair. “Was there anything else you wanted to discuss, Malfoy?”

“No,” Draco said, and watched him.

Potter did not flee the room, because he was not stupid. He did not turn his head back to watch Draco, either, because he was not afraid. But the air around him smelled of straining wire, this time, and sweat, and blood, and his back was stiff.

But not his leg, Draco noticed.

He stood there when Potter was gone, tasting blood in the air, and fire, and vengeance.

And desire.


	6. The Lair

"It’s the third.”

This time, the flunkey’s wet eyes had darted away from him. Harry had known why. He had smiled and nodded and resisted the temptation to draw his wand or crush the parchment of the report he was working on until the flunkey had shut the door behind him. And even then, he had smoothed out the parchment after a moment and gone on working, because he knew that someone would watch his rubbish for signs of such temper.

He walked into Malfoy’s mansion the same way he always did when not wounded: hand not far from his wand, head half-inclined, eyes watching the shadows. He made it to the throne room without stopping, but he paused inside the doorway, the sight of another vampire on the dais striking him as heavily as a blow to the throat.

Then he saw the way the vampire knelt, its head bowed in the way a dog might use when being scolded, and Malfoy’s long, white fingers sweeping back and forth against the vampire’s black hair, as bright as magnesium in the darkness. Malfoy still sat on the throne, and he was the one who had a slight sheen of blood on his fangs, the one whose head moved around, and the one whose eyes still looked the way they should, without a taint of another color.

 _Only you would be_ relieved _to see a vampire who’s fed recently,_ Harry thought, and released a sigh that he hoped would be soundless even to Malfoy’s ears. Perhaps Hermione had been right when she told him the other day that she thought the negotiator position might be making him more sympathetic to vampires, and not always in the good sense of the word.

“Lord Malfoy,” he said, and tried to keep his voice quiet, as much out of respect for the kneeling vampire as for Malfoy. There was something about that utterly submissive arch of the neck that got to him. “I have something to speak to you about.”

“The same subject I have to speak to you about, no doubt.” Malfoy gestured, his hand bending upwards with the grace of a swaying palm branch, and the kneeling vampire rose and bowed. Malfoy nodded to him, and he backed away from the throne, body still frozen in the half-bow. When he reached the stairs down from the throne, he took them as if he hovered on marionette strings, and never turned even when he reached the door.

Harry lightly clenched his fists. He had known that Malfoy had killed Duncan, the member of his flock who had spied for the Ministry, and he had seen the unnatural grey in the eyes of the vampire who had opened the door for him a few months ago. But this was the first time he had actually seen Malfoy exercising his power over someone else.

“It bothers you,” Malfoy said, and sniffed the air as he said it. What he smelled there made him freeze with his head on one side.

Harry met his eyes and thought the arch of his neck this way really wasn’t that different from the arch of the other vampire’s as it knelt. “No,” he said. “It should, but it doesn’t.” He hesitated, then decided that he might as well say the thought bubbling behind his lips. It probably wouldn’t give him any peace until he did, anyway. “I—don’t think it’s too different from some of the Auror tricks that I use. The power I exercise.”

“You have the power to imprison,” Malfoy said, and leaned back and crossed his legs on the arm of the throne. It was more than grace when he did it; he moved as if he didn’t have bones in his knees. Harry felt his throat dry out. _He’s dead, he’s dead, but he doesn’t move like a corpse,_ he thought, which meant the thought hadn’t accomplished what it was meant to. “To kill. To hold someone indefinitely.”

“There are laws about that,” Harry began, and Malfoy flicked a glance that slid over his face like an icicle bound to bare skin. Harry paused, and then added, “In theory. In practice, we do have the power to do that, yes, especially someone like me.”

Malfoy laughed, a sound that got everywhere up and down Harry’s skin, like the claws of rats hooked beneath his shirt. “There is no one like you, Potter.”

Harry held his breath for a count of three. The slight discomfort in his chest took his thoughts away from Malfoy’s laughter and reminded him what he was here for. He shook his head and settled into the chair that Malfoy kept ready for him. It was strange to think of anything in a vampire’s house as belonging to him, but this seemed to.

_Other things could, too._

Harry clenched his jaw and held his breath for a count of six, this time. That was the kind of thought that would lead to other thoughts that would lead to actions like the one he had come here to discuss with Malfoy.

Malfoy swung back upright and stared at him. “Speak,” he said.

Harry stifled a brief burst of stupid gratitude, like a firework in his chest, that Malfoy could sense his emotions well enough to react like that. _Yeah, it’s because he’s a vampire, they can all do that, get over it._ “One of your flock attacked one of my Aurors,” he said quietly. “Dyerson. Young kid, just finding his feet. He obeyed the rules, I would swear. The vampire used the thrall on him.”

Malfoy didn’t fold his arms across his chest or hiss or snap or do anything else that Harry had thought he would do. He had carried mourning with him into the house, mourning he shouldn’t have had, the same kind of mourning he had used last month when he had thought Malfoy would toss him out or try to kill him or simply request someone else because Harry had killed his sire. He shouldn’t mourn if Malfoy grew angry about this, either. Dyerson was the innocent in this situation.

He would recover from the loss of blood. Eventually. It would be harder to recover from the marks of fangs in his throat. Those feeding scars usually didn’t go away, and would earn Dyerson taunts for years about being the kind of addicted idiot who sold his blood to vampires.

Malfoy said, “The vampire who attacked him is called Franklin. That was the one you saw in here just now. I was tasting him. I can see his memories that way. I know why he attacked Dyerson.”

Harry closed his eyes, then snapped them open again. Malfoy had refrained from attacking him before. That didn’t mean he always would, and Harry would be stupid to ask Malfoy to act against his nature. If Malfoy chose to do so, it was a gift, one he gave without the asking. “Why?”

“Because your Auror carried a potion in his bloodstream that would enchant any vampire as young and empty-headed as Franklin,” Malfoy said calmly. “Whether the Auror knew he’d been dosed by it, I don’t know. Franklin’s memories didn’t show enough clarity to be sure before the emotions invaded and he attacked to ease the hunger.”

Harry leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He felt Malfoy shift, and wondered for a moment if he was exposing the line of his throat. But he had something else to think about, something even more important than Malfoy and keeping tabs on him.

Strange to think that he could think that and mean it.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I thought I heard—there was a rumor, months ago. They were developing a potion like that. I thought it was only a rumor.”

“You should have reported it to me.” Malfoy’s voice whispered and dragged.

“Yes,” Harry said. “I forgot about it, because it was before they made me your negotiator. But I should have.”

Silence, silence that also whispered and dragged. Harry lowered his head to see Malfoy standing in front of him. He was too tired to start.

“What?” he asked, rising to his feet. This was a mess. The Ministry would press for an immediate attack on Malfoy’s flock, and Harry didn’t know how he was supposed to stop it. His mind was distant, floating in a dark sea that he mostly pulled himself from when he came here. He had to concentrate on the reality of what Malfoy was and what his house was like, or he wouldn’t survive it.

“You needn’t,” Malfoy said.

“What?” Harry shook his head. “Speak to the Ministry? Go back to the Ministry?” Malfoy tipped his head forwards, as if to keep his throat from the fangs of another dominant vampire, and Harry sighed. “This was the job I signed up for. If not this exact one, then one like it, when I became an Auror.”

Malfoy glided away from him, and turned his back. Harry opened his mouth, then closed it. He could ask to know the answer, but if Malfoy wanted him to know why he was upset, he could also _say_ it. And he was probably upset because his flock was now in greater danger than ever. Sending an Auror out with that potion in his bloodstream was asking for trouble with the vampires, and given how large Malfoy’s flock was, there was a greater chance that the attacker would come from it.

Harry had agreed to become negotiator in the first place to prevent that trouble from springing up between Malfoy’s vampires and the Ministry.

He’d failed.

He swallowed against the acid taste of failure in his throat and half-bowed his head to Malfoy. “I’ll bring you a solution soon, I promise. May I come back before the third if I need to, to speak to you?”

Malfoy stood so still that Harry would have missed the tiny tilt of his head, if he hadn’t been looking for it. If he could look anywhere but Malfoy, as the trouble receded from his mind and he thought about it again.

If Malfoy hadn’t brought his head down to protect his throat, if it had been a nod…

Malfoy had given things to him, advice and invitations and _stares_. Harry had given back what he could, but he had never done this. He stepped nearer Malfoy anyway, moving the way he imagined a deer would when sneaking through a pack of sleeping wolves, and rested his hand on Malfoy’s shoulder.

Denser bone than a human’s, he thought. Colder flesh. But something that made him close his eyes and have to fight the impulse to rest there, rest head and hand and burdens.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “That you might want me here, that you might offer to shelter me from the Ministry even with as much as it would cost your flock, means a lot.”

Malfoy glanced back at him, twisting his head around without moving his body. His neck appeared boneless when he did that, Harry thought, and the muscles in his stomach contracted with an emotion he would not identify, because he didn’t want to.

“You don’t understand everything,” Malfoy said.

“No,” Harry said simply. “I don’t understand why you’ve offered me all you have, and I don’t understand everything that I’ve done in response, and I don’t understand how to keep your flock safe.”

Malfoy showed his fangs. “And I don’t understand why you go back.”

Harry shook his head and lifted his hand. His skin yearned for the cold he had touched the way it sometimes yearned for the warmth of a human lover when he moved away from one in the same bed. He swallowed and flexed his hand and ignored, once again, the bending and bowing of muscles in his body that had no business doing that.

“I do my job,” he said. “That’s still most important.”

“My senses,” Malfoy said, “are keen enough to hear unspoken words.”

He did not gesture, he did not move, he did nothing but stare. Harry was the one who turned his back and retreated from the room, not-running deliberately, his head up and his blank stare fixed on the walls.

_Unspoken words. Like “for now.”_

 


	7. Verbs

 

Draco lifted his head. Then he paused. He had smelled a scent of blood, he was sure of it, through the nose of the vampire he had on guard at the door—

And, abruptly, there was a leash pulling tight in the back of his mind, as someone yanked against the chain that he had on the impulses and instincts of the flock. Draco straightened and put slack in the chain again without thought, but his fingers had twitched open. “Florent,” he said aloud. He didn’t need to, but he savored the sound as a counterpoint against the abrupt noise of accelerating footsteps. Florent was on his way to the front door.

Draco leaned back on the throne, shut his eyes, left a bit of his perceptions and senses guarding his body against any dominance challenge, and then sent the rest of his control speeding along the leashes that linked him to the other vampires, to Florent and the door guard this morning, Amelia.

Darkness came to him, flavored with starlight, and moonlight, and dust. And blood. Potter stood with one arm braced against the side of the doorway, his body swaying with small tremors that he was trying to control, his eyes filled with shattered light that made the moon and stars seem dim.

“It’s nothing,” he was saying. “Could you take a message to the Lord Malfoy and tell him that I’m here? On the third. As always.”

Draco watched through Amelia’s eyes, and tightened her chain again as a long, thin slice of dark red slid down Potter’s temple, from under the dark hair.

 _Nothing._ Potter stood on the flock’s doorstep, bleeding from a recent attack—he still had his wand out, there was still the dusty-hot scent of his magic in the air—and he wanted Amelia, and Draco through her, to believe it was nothing.

Draco flowed upright. He concentrated on the stone of the chair arms under his palms, the darkness of the stone that was like the darkness of blood, the way that it crumbled and cracked under his touch but did not flake. He had built the throne to last. He had _had_ it built. His mind hummed and sang with the pressure of controlling Amelia’s hunger, of Florent’s hunger as he smelled the blood, and their fear as Draco’s rage echoed up the links to them. They escorted Potter into the house, staying well back and with their fangs bared against any other vampire who approached them, rather than in search for the blood that still trickled under Potter’s battered and torn clothes.

Draco sat, and waited.

When Potter stepped into the throne room, he glanced around as though he believed Draco would be somewhere other than the throne. Then he saw him, and half-bowed his head. He tried to keep his lips apart as he straightened, to conceal the hiss that the movements cost him, but Draco saw, and heard, and smelled.

And _would not tolerate._

“Who attacked you?” he asked.

“I don’t know the name, and they didn’t bother showing me their face,” Potter said, dry as the scent of his magic, as he turned towards the chair set out for him. Draco snapped his fingers, and Florent and Amelia hurtled like hounds towards the chair, dragging it forwards across the floor. Potter paused, then snapped a glance over his shoulder as sharp as the sound of Draco’s fingers.

“Thank you,” he said, having better sense than to argue against _that_ , at least, and seated himself. Florent and Amelia hovered on either side of him until Draco twitched the chains in his mind and told them without words to go. Then they backed out of the room, heads twisted to the sides so Draco could reach their throats easily.

It was not their throats he wanted to reach.

“You will tell me what happened,” Draco said, and Potter paused in wiping stone grit out of his hair and raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, if you’d give me a chance to make myself presentable, then I will,” he said, and shook more grit out. Draco watched, although the subtlety of his senses had already detected the presence of another source of blood, and saw the moment when Potter’s expression twitched into nausea and he raised one hand as though to touch the side of his head, then snatched it back down.

“They drove you into the wall with the force of their attack,” Draco said. “They must have struck just as you appeared from the Apparition.”

“Of course, if you want to tell your own version, I’ll just sit here and listen to you.” Potter swung his legs over the arm of the chair in the poor human’s version of the gesture Draco favored and stared at him.

 _Yes. Listen to me._ Draco placed the hunger for that in the same cupboard where he had confined his hunger for Potter’s blood, and the hunger of his followers. Most vampires could not have done that, but most vampires were not the leaders of flocks. He studied Potter and saw the purpling, bleeding bruise on the side of his head, the deep cut on the side of his neck, the way that he shifted his arse and back on the uncushioned chair.

“Tell me,” he said, and lowered his voice. Potter froze in mid-motion, then sighed and lowered his head.

“They struck at me when I was coming out of Apparition, like you said,” he mumbled, apparently having a constitutional dislike of raising his voice to a proper level. “They must have known exactly when and where I would arrive.” He grimaced. Draco watched the play of the small muscles in his face. “Not hard, when a dozen people watched me leave the Ministry.”

“That is not usual,” Draco said.

“You _do_ want to help tell the story, don’t you?” Potter muttered.

Draco stretched and leaped off the throne, coming down more slowly than gravity would have demanded at the foot of the dais. Potter froze, and a welcome new scent mixed with that of his blood and magic, a scent that had a flicker of subdued fire to it. Draco did not mind the subdued nature of it. This was a flame that he would stir to full burning soon enough.

“No,” he said, voice coming from near Potter’s ear as he threw it, though he still stood more than sixteen paces away. “Then what happened?”

“Whoever it was had Auror-level training.” Potter watched him, and his eyes had narrowed, his chin had lowered, and he had his wand comfortably in his lap. Draco felt his fangs extend. Potter was aware of him, ready to move, but that heated component to his scent hadn’t vanished—and need never, as far as Draco was concerned. “At the least. The spells came fast, but they weren’t as good at offense as I am at defense. One Blasting Curse that took me into the wall, as you said. I got a Shield Charm up in time to take most of the force of it, and then they tried with several Cutting Curses, a Leg-Breaker—which was misaimed at my _waist,_ of all places, and shook me up a bit when I tried to block—and—” He fell silent.

Draco came closer. He thought he glided, but how he moved wasn’t important right now. He watched Potter instead, and the way that Potter’s lungs inflated, and the way his hands curled on the chair next to him, and the way that wand stayed still.

“You will tell me what happened,” Draco whispered. “You will not protect someone who tried to kill you.” Someone standing a few paces away might have heard the croon in his voice and thought those words to Potter were less than orders. Potter was not a few paces away.

He swallowed, and his eyes flickered to the side. Draco took another long, blurring stride closer, and then his palm cradled the side of Potter’s head.

“They tried to use the Cruciatus Curse on me,” Potter admitted. “A little bit of it got through. I wasn’t expecting that, and I had a shield in place, but not fast enough.”

Draco nodded. “And you think that the person who did this came from the Ministry.” Once again, he asked no questions. He did lean close enough that he could smell the precise mingling of Potter’s blood and sweat and skin-smell in his nostrils. His palm remained in place, supporting, binding, holding.

“Had to be,” Potter said, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a snarl that was impressive despite its lack of fangs. “I’ve done too well by interviewing Dyerson, getting him to admit that he suspected that potion he took which enthralled your vampire was a deliberate political move, and publicizing it. They underestimated how eager the papers always are to talk to me.” Now his teeth showed. “I soothed another confrontation between the Ministry and your flock, and took away their nice little pretext for attacking you. I’m doing this bloody job too well.”

“Yes,” Draco said, and he bent, his mouth so near the blood that his tongue could flicker out and taste it. And he would. In a moment. He saw no point, however, in securing the satiation of the hunger in his stomach without soothing all his other hungers at the same time. “And the job is doing you bloody.”

He felt Potter’s laughter through his hand. “That’s a good joke, Malfoy.”

“No jokes,” Draco said, and his voice was a croon, and that was very well, because there was no one else to hear it but those who needed to. “Your own employers tried to kill you. I know how hard it is for you to sit here without reaching out and touching me. I can _feel_ the way your heartbeat shakes your body.”

“Wait a minute, Malfoy,” Potter began, and his body surged with a motion that did not become a rise to his feet because Draco did not allow it to.

“Does your heartbeat lie?” He extended his tongue and let it hover less than an eyelash’s blink from the bloody side of Potter’s throat, let himself feel the heat, let Potter feel the wetness. “Does the way that you trust me, that you offer me your throat without thinking, that you continue to protect me and do what you think is necessary to help me no matter what your employers say? Stay here.” He made it an order in the same way he had made the request to tell him about the attack an order. “You are _mine_.”

Potter’s backhand to the mouth broke both his fangs.

Draco snapped back to the throne in a series of leaps, hissing. The leashes in his mind trembled, but he held back the vampires. He ran his tongue along the bottom points of the fangs, and discovered that he had lost only the tips. Good. A dominant vampire could regrow his fangs, but it would have taken months if it was done closer to the top, while this would be the work of only a few nights.

He lifted his head and looked up at Potter, who had risen to his feet and showed no signs, now, of a curse meant to break bones or the most intense pain curse wizards had ever invented.

“Everything you said about my wanting to help you and trust you is true,” Potter said, and looked at Draco as from a mountain height. All else in his scent, even the blood, even the magic, had vanished behind a scent of dust. “Everything about the Ministry being a bunch of untrustworthy bastards. Everything about the way I offer my throat.” He paused. “Everything but the last.”

Draco was still.

“I _offered_ you my throat, you said.” Potter’s heartbeat was fast and loud, but his eyes never closed, and his wand never wavered. “You should have learned to emphasize the verbs better, _Lord_ Malfoy. I am never someone’s unless I _give_ myself.”

Draco was still. If he was not, he would attack, because Potter issued a challenge now worse than Duncan when he had thought he could take the flock, worse than Yacinth the first moment Draco opened his eyes as a newly-created vampire and found him standing there. Composed, complete in himself, far from the creature of heedless heartbeat that Draco had thought he saw sitting in that chair.

“You can’t take that gift,” Potter finished, and turned on his heel. No sign of pain as he walked from the room. No sign of blood. His wounds had sealed themselves.

Draco was still. Then he lifted one hand, cradled in his lap rather than clutching the arm of his throne, and used his tongue to lick the small drop of blood he had managed to collect there from Potter’s wound before he was flung away.

The taste on his tongue was like seeing sunlight again.

 


	8. Defining Mastery

 

Harry halted in front of the door to Malfoy’s mansion and closed his eyes. He pictured a cup of clear water held above the burning part of his mind. He pictured the water pouring out, dousing the flames. He pictured himself walking into the room to make a business report, the thing he was supposed to do here in any case. His breathing slowed, and he opened his eyes ready to do it.

Until the door opened, and a female vampire standing in the doorway looked at him with dark eyes that held more than a touch of grey. Then Harry had to clench his teeth down and walk past her wondering what Malfoy would look like when he saw him again, if those eyes would be as calm and as bloody.

_It doesn’t matter. You know it doesn’t. You were the one who did something wrong. You forgot what he was, and encouraged him._

Harry practiced the picture of cold water again as he walked through the corridors, the dim magnificence flashing at him here and there, light catching on an impossibly delicate vase holding a spray of lilies or the gilded frame of a mirror. He could do this. Of course he could. He wasn’t wounded this time, and he had cast a charm that would make any blood he spilled clot at once. He was taking the precautions he should have before.

He had treated Malfoy like a…human. He had to remember he was a vampire, a dangerous magical creature. Anything less wasn’t paying Malfoy the respect he had earned, as a vampire Lord powerful enough to make the Ministry send a negotiator to him instead of trying to eliminate him right away.

Harry shrugged with one shoulder as he moved through the door to the throne room. And he could think that, but he couldn’t completely change his instincts or his reactions. It was stupid to think he could.

He would have to _try_ , and hope he could do his best.

Malfoy sat on the throne, his arms planted flat, his stare planted straight ahead. Harry let his shoulders drop from the hunch they had adopted without meaning to, and nodded to him. This might work out for the best, then. Malfoy looked as he had when they first began their meetings, months ago. That they might go back to something that had worked was better than Harry had expected.

There was no adopting the joking tone he had come up with then, though. He kept his eyes on the floor instead as he murmured greetings and moved forwards to a position in front of the throne where Malfoy could easily see him. He watched his feet and counted the number of his boot laces twice before Malfoy spoke. His voice whispered and boomed and sighed from the walls and the floor and the roof, a thunderous hiss.

“What do you have to report?”

“That the Ministry has promised to leave the flock alone, and promised to catch the ones who attacked me the last time I was here,” Harry said at once. He made his voice smooth and light, like the tone he used to report to the Head Auror. But he had rarely respected the Head Auror. Here, he left politics behind and took up politeness instead. “They made the promises on air, and you know their words are a waste of breath. But that’s the official position. I thought you should know it.”

“ _This_ , you could have sent me in a letter.” Malfoy’s voice narrowed down, now only seeming to come from the floor in front of Harry’s boots and one wall to the right.

“My apologies, Lord Malfoy,” Harry said. “If you would have preferred an owl, I should have sent one.”

“Submission does not suit you.”

Harry twitched his head up before he could stop himself, and glared before he could consider the context. Malfoy leaned forwards in a half-crouching position that Harry had seen cats take when just out of the sight of birds. His eyes looked like obsidian buttons, no trace of grey, and his lips parted around perfect fangs.

And knowing what he did, having broken the tips of those fangs last month, having told Malfoy that he could not take what Harry could only willingly _offer_ …

Still, Harry’s throat dried out, and his hand twitched, and he wanted to reach, wanted to touch that cold corded neck, wanted to feel how those shoulders arched, wanted to smooth those arms up and down and twist around while knowing that head was about to descend.

He wanted many things, and he had learned that he could not have some of them. He bobbed his head and said, “No. I don’t think so, either, Lord Malfoy. That was why I said what I did last month.”

Malfoy licked his right fang, then his left, and flowed to his feet. Harry became aware swiftly of the jut of his wand shaft against his elbow, became aware of the way Malfoy’s muscles flowed and draped loosely. He watched as Malfoy made his way down the throne, walking as though he really did have springs in his feet.

Malfoy halted at the bottom step of the dais and nodded. “That is the man I want to bite.”

For a moment, Harry thought he meant someone in the Ministry, or whoever had attacked him last month. Then he understood, and his eyes narrowed as he lifted his chin in an automatic response. That would lock Malfoy’s glance on his pulse, but he didn’t care. He would repeat the words, if he had to. The deference he had planned to show Malfoy when he arrived here felt, abruptly, like a useless and dangerous pretense. “I’m not yours to bite.”

“If you gift yourself to me,” Malfoy said. “That is the only way. I didn’t understand that last month, but now I do. I can worry. I can circle. I can touch, perhaps. But bleeding you waits for permission.”

Harry shook his head. “Vampires don’t ask for permission.”

Malfoy laughed, a sound like a grave exhaling. He began to move around Harry in a circle, his footsteps silent, his unnecessary breath loud. Harry moved with him, keeping eyes on him, his hand resting on his wand. “Do you know what makes a dominant vampire different from others?”

“You command a flock,” Harry said. “The eyes of your door guards reflect yours. You can use their senses. You can read their memories from their blood. You can make them wish that they hadn’t challenged you.”

“The last, any vampire could do,” Malfoy said, his voice marble, his face intent. “But the others, yes. I am impressed that you noted the color of my eyes in Amelia’s. Not many mortals would look that hard.”

“I’m used to noticing things,” Harry said shortly. He wondered when Malfoy would stop the circle. He wasn’t moving fast, as Harry knew he could, but he didn’t hold still the way he had on the throne, either. Harry shivered. He hadn’t realized how much he’d counted on Malfoy’s stillness. He was the one who moved, who reacted, who thrashed around like the hot-blooded little human he was, and Malfoy was the one who glided and then jerked to a stop. “It’s part of my training as an Auror.”

“Aurors have missed that,” Malfoy said, and his voice dropped. Harry listened, but could hear no emotion in it, only coldness. “Hit Wizards have missed that. The negotiators the Ministry sent to me when I first created my flock missed that. You are different.”

Harry snorted, finding familiar ground for a moment in the midst of this dizzy dance. “Many people tell me that.”

“I am not your fan,” Malfoy said. “I am not your co-worker, your partner, your friend.”

Harry nodded. “That was the mistake I made. I treated you like you were a human, and exposed you to unbearable temptation with my blood. I’m sorry.”

“Not unbearable,” Malfoy said, and lifted his head so that the faint light from the torches could catch his fangs. They shimmered like prisms. Harry blinked. “A dominant vampire can subdue the hunger. Most of the time, we have no reason to. We must feed, and the hunger brings us closer to our flock and ensures we understand them. But we can.”

“All right,” Harry said. “So—”

“You tempt me,” Malfoy said. “Not unbearably. Never unbearably.” He turned his head to the side, and fuck, even the faint blue lines of his veins beneath his skin made Harry feel as if he needed a drink. “I let my instincts take me over. You said once that you treated vampires and humans the same unless they tried to kill.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “Is it also a trait of dominant vampires that they leap madly from subject to subject instead of staying on one that makes sense?”

Malfoy ducked his head, laughing softly, and let his hair fan forwards over his face. Harry watched it fall. Each strand shone from the inside like the fangs, and he wondered if it had turned transparent with Malfoy’s change. His hand started forwards, but fell back to his side before it had moved more than an inch. At least he had that much to be proud of. “You amuse me,” Malfoy breathed. “You thrill me. You soothe me. I should have known what you were as soon as I saw you.”

“You did,” Harry said. “An Auror, your negotiator, and a pain in your royal vampire arse.”

“My equal,” Malfoy said. “Not someone I can subdue. Not someone I would wish to subdue.” He flowed to a stop and gave Harry a bow, twisting his head to the side again. Harry wondered if he knew how attractive his veins were and wanted to show them off.

The realization hit him like a burst of starlight.

_No. He’s showing me his throat._

Harry licked his lips. He straightened and flung his head up, responding the only way he could, as a call to battle. His throat was parched, and his legs wobbled worse than they had when he was fighting off the effects of the Cruciatus last month, and his head ached with expanding ripples of wonder and desire, but he stared at Malfoy and let the vampire’s eyes linger on his jugular and showed no fear.

Malfoy was offering Harry a gift of his own, one Harry did not want to refuse.

“It is not a complete exchange,” Malfoy said, and reached out, his hand hovering short of Harry’s arm. “Not yet.”

“No,” Harry said, and tucked his chin back down, and turned so his elbow grazed Malfoy’s palm. “Not yet.”

Malfoy raised his eyelids high, and looked back at him, eyes the color of smoke on dark water, of hematite, of softened obsidian. Harry looked back at him, looked into his eyes and not at his fangs, and saw the way Malfoy’s eyelids fluttered when he absorbed the message.

“You are right,” Malfoy said. “The gift will come—later.”

“It will,” Harry said, and hesitated, and reached out, one finger grazing down the soft robe Malfoy wore. Malfoy tilted his head back and stood there, trembling as fiercely as though Harry held a cup of blood to his lips.

_And I know I didn’t make contact with the skin._

When Malfoy looked back at him, it was at his eyes, and not at his throat.

“Until the third of next month,” he said, words opening a cavern in front of Harry, one he could walk down if he chose.

“Until the third,” he said, and turned away, because he did not choose, not yet. There were still steps in the dance he needed to learn, if only to be sure that Malfoy would not dance him to death like some underworld lord in legend.

But he knew Malfoy watched him walk away, and he took pride in the easy roll of his hips, in the way he held his wand, in the defensive training that he knew made smooth lines out of his body.

Even in the pulse of blood in his veins.

_Mine. And his._

_If I choose._

 


	9. Liar in the Lair

 

It was eleven at night on the third of the month. Draco did not often pay attention to clocks, but he had a silver one next to him now, and watched the bone-white pendulum swing back and forth, slicing the air into slivers, cutting time apart into small, manageable chunks. Not sunset, not sunrise, but names for all the hours in between.

Potter had not yet come.

As he thought that, he felt the tremor through the wards laid outside the mansion, wards that responded only to the blood of one the flock’s lord desired. Draco opened his mouth and held it still, made his lungs inflate with breath and then cool down again. The blood in his veins was sluggish, but stirred to the beat of his heart when he made the effort. With enough of that effort, he thought he could coax up a blush.

Not that Potter needed it, or would notice it if he came.

And here he was, striding into the room where Draco received him with an obnoxiously lifted head, halting when he caught Draco’s eye. Draco did not try to alter his expression, but Potter knew what he meant to convey. For a moment, he ducked his head, and his own cheeks changed color.

Draco sniffed, delicately expanding his nostrils so as to take in the air without offending Potter with his loudness. Dust. Heat. Blood, as always. And something softer and darker, creeping along the edges of Potter’s scent like mist.

Draco knew what it was. He did not expect to smell it here.

He held still, and Potter began an account of what vampire-related legislation the Ministry had passed in the last month. Draco knew of it already. He sat still, scenting and smelling and listening. Yes, there it was, in the irregularity in Potter’s breathing, in the way his muscles moved too often, in the eyes that rolled right and up without input from him and so swiftly a human would not have seen them.

Draco was not human. And in moments like this, for the sake of what he could do for and to Potter without being human, he rejoiced.

Potter ran down. He had not moved to the chair, Draco saw, and not tried to meet Draco’s eyes after the first few minutes of the recitation, despite the fact that he knew neither of them liked or believed in his submission. He stared at his boots, and the irregularity in his breathing became more pronounced.

Draco considered several ways of approaching the matter, all of the thoughts beating through his skull as the fragile as the twist of a butterfly’s wing. And he rejected them in the end, because there was no reason not to. “You are lying to me,” he said.

Potter jerked as if he would spill off his feet, and then came back up glaring. “I am _not_ ,” he said, words as hot as the blood. “Every word I told you about the legislation was the truth. You have your own spies to tell you if it wasn’t, anyway.”

“Not about that,” Draco said, and sniffed the air again, this time not caring if Potter saw him doing it. Perhaps that would mean he stopped lying, which would be an advantage. The fragile, drifting deception, and intent to deceive, which Draco had sensed before, had now increased to the point that it would have tainted Potter’s scent soon without any of his extraordinary efforts to discover it. Draco leaned back in his chair, tapped his fingers on the stone arm of the throne, and stared at Potter. “You thought you could lie to me?”

Potter’s teeth showed for a brief instant. Then he said, “What I found out does no good. You can’t use the knowledge.”

Draco stood. “Say that again,” he said. “With full belief.”

Potter watched him for a moment and then looked away again. At least he had ceased to drop his eyes. Draco watched the way his jugular and carotid moved with his neck, and stifled his hunger again. Long delay might make the appetite sweeter. “You could use the knowledge,” Potter said. “But not without risk.”

“I am a dominant vampire,” Draco began, taking the first step down from the throne.

He crouched there as Potter whirled back on him. In a moment, he knew what spring he would take to break Potter’s neck. Potter gripped his wand, and then pulled his hand back and shook his head with what looked like more than ordinary gloom.

“You told me what that means,” he said. “It makes you better with vampires. Not less vulnerable to peo—humans. The Ministry finds you moving with your flock, and they’ll have all the excuse they need to destroy you.”

“Tell me,” Draco said, and flickered his tongue out. As with snakes, this sometimes made the smells in the air more intense for him, and it was doing so now. Potter trembled on the edge of exhaustion, he thought. His head was bowed, his legs locked against the possibility, but he would tumble in the end.

Draco thought of catching him, and had to fight the temptation to retract the order to tell the truth, which might lead to truth, which might lead to Potter resting. He would very much like to catch Potter if he strained to keep upright and then fell.

_But I can catch him in other ways. Ways that can wait._

“I—I found out who attacked me two months ago, when I came into your lair wounded,” Potter said. He seemed to make an effort to keep the words “bloody” or “bleeding” from his lips. He clenched his hands into fists in front of him and stared at Draco, his eyes two pools of phoenix fire. “But that’s it. The Ministry dropped the knowledge in front of me like a lure. They want me to use it. They _want_ you to emerge from hiding and try to destroy this person. That means they’ll have an excuse to move on you.”

“I am not hiding,” Draco said.

“From your stronghold, then.” Potter still looked at him with those phoenix-fire eyes, but his mouth relaxed enough to form a smile. Draco wondered what those teeth would taste like against his fangs. “But they know that you—they know you find me an important enough ally to attack someone who attacks me. What I don’t know is how they found that out,” he added, and bowed his head to frown at his hands.

“They were able to send an assassin to the gates of what you call my stronghold without alerting me,” Draco pointed out dryly as he stood. “They have either vampire allies—who could smell my scent on you—or they keep you under close observation. I am inclined to suspect the latter, as any vampires who aided them, whether or not they were part of my flock, would know what I could do to them if I caught them.” He sauntered down the steps towards Potter, who looked up to watch him.

“What you have not explained is why I should not emerge,” he murmured, and extended his tongue so that it nearly touched Potter’s ear. The scent of his skin there, if slightly sour from earwax, was still heady enough that it meant Draco needed the support of the steps. “Why should I not kill the one who tried to kill you?”

“Because it’s a _trap_ ,” Potter said, and began speaking with so much space between his words that Draco could have strangled him before he finished the sentence. “Have you heard of the word _trap_? It has four letters, and it rhymes with _snap_ , which the Ministry would do to your neck if you ventured out.”

Draco laughed, not a sound but a breath, and watched Potter turn in response to it. His eyes had changed color, the green deepening as black spread through it. Draco looked closer, and saw the flecks of blue and grey and jade and hazel buried deep in the green, all the different shades that made it what it was. “They fear me enough to send you to the flock as negotiator, and you think they could destroy me?”

Potter grimaced. “If you react as thoughtlessly as you did two months ago when you tried to claim I was yours, then yes.”

Draco paused, and lowered the hand that he had started to move to rest on the nape of Potter’s neck. He did not retract it to his side, however, but kept it hovering near the small of Potter’s back. There might yet be a need for it. “That is what you fear, then?” he asked. “That I would attack because I consider you mine, and fall victim that way?”

Potter nodded. “I saw your eyes when you spoke to me that way,” he said. “They’re never human, but just then, they were animal. Malfoy.” He leaned forwards until his lips were near Draco’s. Draco waited, and it was the greatest feat of control he had managed since he became a dominant vampire. “You have to think about this. Your flock needs you. Not me. There’s no reason for you to help me hunt down the one who attacked me. I’ll handle him myself.”

Draco half-turned his head to the side, and his tongue touched Potter’s cheek. Potter tilted his head back in response, and Draco’s hand had started for his neck again, his fangs had started for the bared throat, before he remembered, and leashed himself.

“I cannot hunt him down as one friend for another?” Draco whispered, knowing Potter’s ears would pick up the reply no matter how softly he said it. They were too close for that not to happen. Potter’s heartbeat sang in his ears, he heard the nervous gulp, but he, also, would hear any words Potter chose to speak; they were too precious to lose. “You are not a vampire, not a member of my flock, not my lover. Not _mine_. But friendship is an equal bond, a claim that cannot be challenged or abandoned without pain. You would not allow me to hunt him down because you are my friend?”

Potter swallowed again and opened his eyes, looking as if he didn’t know when they had fallen shut. “No,” he said, and his voice was faint as ashes but flashed to fire in an instant as he stared at Draco. “And I’ll tell you why.”

Draco’s hand was a whisper-glide across his shoulder, not that Potter seemed to feel it. “I can hardly wait,” he breathed.

“Because my friends would leave him alive,” Potter said. “They would arrest him and bring him in. You would kill him.”

Draco smiled to control the rage that had risen up in him. He could smile in joy; he could snarl in rage. Either way, he needed his fangs bared at the moment. “Then don’t call us friends,” he suggested. “Call us those who will belong to each other in the future. Please, Potter. Allow me.” His words snapped in the air like manacles shutting.

Potter blinked at him for a moment, a drugged glaze in his eyes, and Draco understood something he had not before. Potter _wanted_ to do that. Some part of him would have thrilled to the sight of blood and vengeance, would have heard that the man who had attacked him was dead of a vampire’s stroke across the throat and would have smiled and smiled.

But he would not allow himself to be that needy. In another moment, the desire was gone, and Potter merely lifted his eyebrows and shook his head.

Draco breathed in rage, breathed out acceptance. He touched Potter on the back of the neck, because he had to have something, and then murmured, “Very well. I will leave you to handle it. If you grant me two things.”

Potter watched him with wild-summer eyes, and said nothing.

“If you come to my house when you are in need of sanctuary,” Draco said. “And immediately on the day that the Ministry gets to be too much for you.”

He heard Potter’s lips straining around the subvocalized words, his urge to say that the Ministry would _never_ be too much for him. But in the end, he was smart enough to hold them back and nod, waiting for the second request.

Draco leaned forwards and kissed him.

His fangs scraped against Potter’s lips, and did not cut, because Draco willed them not to. He scraped Potter’s tongue with his own, and felt the jump that poured through him when Draco did that, all the trained and shivering muscles locked in an instant and poised for action. Potter’s mouth was hot as Hell, his tongue slippery as Draco’s morals. Draco drew him closer and tasted copper and warmth and sunlight, lingering until he knew he would have to bite and claim if he stayed.

Then he drew back. Potter blinked after him, raising a hand to touch his mouth. The yearning in his eyes made Draco poise on the balls of his feet. If Potter beckoned him, he would be there in an instant.

But in the end, Potter chose to turn and walk away without sound or other motion.

Draco sighed and sat down on the last step leading up to his throne. His tongue had gathered one drop of blood from the inside of Potter’s mouth, from some not-quite-healed cut, and he held off until he could hear his stomach cramping.

Then he flicked his tongue back into his mouth, and tasted what to him was sweeter than orgasm.

_I can wait. I must wait, knowing the reward._

_But, Harry. Do not make me wait too long._

 


	10. Out of the Mouths of Vampires

Harry rested one hand against the door of Malfoy’s mansion, and wondered who would know if he turned back now. He carried the burden on his shoulders of the knowledge his investigations had granted him, and yes, it was knowledge that would comfort Malfoy and knowledge that was not exactly new. He might chide Harry for bringing him old news. He would not care about it in the same way Harry would.

It was not what he might care about, but what he might urge, that was the problem with Harry seeing Malfoy this month. It was the poised, trembling crack in the middle of Harry’s soul that might open to Malfoy’s call.

He could not deal with that.

He turned his back to leave, and the door swung open behind him, with a small click like the springing of a trap. Harry turned around and squared his shoulders. Well, after all, he had never expected it to be that easy.

“Lord Malfoy will see you,” said the vampire on the door, one of the female vampires Harry had seen before, the one with the most grey in the middle of her black eyes. She bowed, and held the bow until Harry walked past her and into the warm, muffled, echoing dark of the inner chambers.

The door shut behind him with the same low click, and the vampire came up to walk in front of him as a herald. Harry watched her back. She could have walked behind him, and then he could have felt the paranoia of wondering how much hunger flowed through her, how long it would take for her fangs to pierce the back of his neck, or she could have walked beside him, and then she would have seemed like a guard of honor.

 _I shouldn’t have come._ Aside from no real news to impart, his body jangled like a piano played out of tune the closer he got to Malfoy; his muscles twitched and flinched, and he could feel his heartbeat in his throat. The delicate tilt of the vampire’s head in front of him said that she had heard it, too.

_I shouldn’t—no one wants me here._

That wasn’t true, of course. Malfoy did, and Harry had awakened from dreams of the mansion, of Malfoy, of vampires for the last four nights in a row. He closed his eyes, and his feet found their way down the corridors without assistance, without pause. His heartbeat was already slowing, as though the air carried Calming Draught in the form of a gas.

Harry swallowed, and swallowed again. He wanted to halt and touch his throat, probe the sensation of thickness in it and make sure he wasn’t choking, but he didn’t have the chance. The vampire ahead of him swept the door to the throne room open, announced, “Auror Potter to see Lord Malfoy,” and then bowed and once again held the pose, obnoxiously, until Harry could move past her and see the interior of the room.

Malfoy sat on his dark throne, his head turned to the side this time, so that his eyes met Harry’s immediately.

Harry came to a stop, and yes, the split in his soul opened wider, and wider, and wider, and filled him with pulsing, glorious light. He tried to swallow, but it was difficult when he couldn’t _breathe._ The thickness in his throat seemed to shrink as he thought about it, though, to fill him with something better to breathe than air.

He extended one hand before he thought about it, and then pulled it back to his side.

Or he would have, if Malfoy hadn’t crossed the room in one of those quiet, swift blurs that Harry had known vampires could make from his first year of Auror training and taken it instead. He turned his head to the side, eyes so intent on Harry he couldn’t have missed the moment when he tensed unacceptably, and placed cool, dry lips against the back of Harry’s knuckles. Something left a brief spot of wetness on Harry’s skin, but he didn’t know if it was Malfoy’s tongue or his saliva.

Malfoy didn’t release the hand, the way Harry had thought he would when he was done making his gesture, but he did straighten. He simply cradled Harry’s wrist, his expression calm, unanswerable, and when Harry made a small tugging motion with his arm, Malfoy’s fingers tightened. His smile was charming, if you overlooked the fangs and the strength in his grip and the coldness of his skin and everything else he was.

“I heard about the Ashkanova case,” he said, his voice so deep and lulling that Harry thought for a moment it was like being drowned in melted chocolate. Of course it wasn’t. Melted chocolate would be warm.

“What case—oh.” Harry shook his head. Yes, the case had happened three days ago, but already it seemed to have retreated before the weight of his new knowledge. That wasn’t the news he had come to Malfoy carrying on his shoulders. “Well, I brushed up against death, but it left me none the worse for wear.” He smiled at Malfoy, and thought for a moment that Malfoy’s fingers moved on his wrist, caressing rather than holding.

“A day in hospital,” Malfoy said. “Half the blood in your body replaced.” The flare in his eyes struck deep, but not too deep, and Harry licked his lips. Malfoy tracked the movement of his tongue with alert eyes, not pretending that he was not, and then looked up again. “I would not call that none the worse for wear.”

Harry gave him a plastic smile. “Well, we all have different definitions.” He nodded down at his captive fingers, and flexed them. Malfoy’s fingers moved to cover them. “For example, I thought it was your _head_ that you put in the lion’s mouth, not your hand.”

Malfoy turned it over. “Ah,” he said. “But is not the old metaphor an offer of one’s _hand_? I am no longer human, but I haven’t spent enough years away from the human world for that to change.”

Harry shivered and bowed his head. Malfoy’s free hand came up and slid around the side of his neck, fingers running up his jaw and down again, down to the pulse, up to his ear. Harry’s heart doubled and rebounded beneath it, but not from fear.

_Of course. I’m not sensible enough to do that from fear._

“It was an hour before I heard that you had survived Ashkanova,” said Malfoy. “The report that you were in hospital came first. Until I heard that you lived, the Ministry could have had their vengeance. I would have come forth, and all the walls of the holding cells would not have stopped me.”

Harry clenched his teeth and told his heartbeat, his stuttering breath when Malfoy’s fingers traveled back down and along his collarbone, his whole stupid sentimental _stupidity_ , to stop it. The knowledge he carried had to come out now. Malfoy’s li—existence, and the existence of his flock, mattered more than what Harry felt about him. And it certainly mattered more than the privilege Harry had, to keep visiting them.

 _Ah. That’s familiar._ Guilt like broken glass flared in him. At last he understood why he hadn’t wanted to talk about this. Because Malfoy would do what he had to do as a dominant vampire, and that meant Harry would never see him again. But that was for the best. It had to be. How much could the light in his soul matter against the knowledge that the Ministry wanted to destroy Malfoy, and had come up with a way to do so?

“Malfoy,” he whispered, and found himself mouthing it against chill fingers, as Malfoy’s hand had risen to cover his mouth.

“Call me by my first name,” Malfoy whispered. “Speak that, and I promise to listen to whatever you say.”

Harry hesitated, all too aware that a promise to listen wasn’t a promise to _act_. But he had already trusted far more dangerous promises from Malfoy, so he mouthed, “Draco,” and saw Malfoy lid his eyes and twist his head to the side, baring his throat to Harry once more.

“Harry,” he said back, and Harry clenched his fists and ground the glass in his soul underfoot once more, all so he would have the pain.

“I know,” he said. “I heard them talking about it. They—I thought they granted me the position of negotiator because I was making a fuss about them eliminating your flock and they wanted to punish me, and save the embarrassment I could have caused them if I sought publicity. Now I’ve overheard them talking. It was more than that. They always meant to kill you, but you were the target, not me. Someone suggested to them that you might become fascinated with me because of that old rivalry we had. I was always _meant_ to lure you out into the open, whether you hated me or—”

He couldn’t speak the other word. He couldn’t profane it like that. And even as he laughed the word _profane_ to scorn in his head and told himself he was an idiot, he still kept silent and fixed his eyes on Malfoy.

Malfoy stood in silence back, and Harry found himself holding his breath, trying to match the pure, almost terrible serenity Malfoy showed. He failed, of course, and all his breath rushed out at once in a whoosh. Malfoy opened his mouth and showed him his fangs, and Harry smiled back before he realized that he didn’t know if he should classify that as a smile.

Malfoy’s fingers smoothed up and down his neck. He had let go of Harry’s hand, and seemed instead to want to measure the heart, the width, the smoothness, anything he could touch, of his throat. But he still never looked away from Harry’s eyes. So Harry looked back, and let himself think about impossible things until Malfoy spoke.

“You were meant,” he said. “You did not mean. That makes the difference.”

Harry half-tossed his head, and then went still, because Malfoy’s hand had moved around to the back of his neck and pressed gently down. “It could still happen. If you venture out because of me, whether it’s at a time the Ministry anticipated or not—even if it’s to avenge me, whatever—then you’ll still die. They’ll strike with overwhelming force. I didn’t realize—I don’t know if _you_ realize how badly you’ve scared them. There hasn’t been a flock this powerful and this organized in a long time. I thought you were thinking all the anti-vampire legislation revolved around you because of your ego, but it really was directed against you, at least all the stuff they’ve passed in the last few months, all of it. I’m sorry that—”

“Apologies, I will not accept from you,” Malfoy said, and lifted his hands to cup Harry’s face. “A kiss, yes. Desires, wishes, declarations, facts, plans. Nothing else.”

Harry winced and reached up to pry away Malfoy’s fingers. Malfoy let him, but it was clear that it was letting and that Harry would never get rid of him completely if Malfoy didn’t want him to. Harry felt his stupid heartbeat once more step up the pace, and there was light inside him, and he shook his head. “You have to distance yourself from me,” he said. “I can’t stop coming here, because then the Ministry will realize what’s up and try something else, but you can—you can move your flock to a safer place. You can go, Draco. That’s what you need to do.”

Malfoy’s hands swept over him like white wind, and ended on his waist. It might have been a full embrace; Harry felt as _held_ as if it was.

“I will not let the Ministry dictate to me,” said Malfoy. “Neither to you. I said we are equals? I will not run, because you will not. I do not choose separation. Neither do you. You only advise it because you think you must.” He leaned nearer. “So we will not.”

Harry raised his hands and curved nerveless fingers around Draco’s. “But if something happened to you because of me,” he said, “then I couldn’t bear it.”

“So it is down to Gryffindor guilt,” Draco said, and moved closer, so that Harry could feel the cold of his body as he might feel heat. “I do not choose to rule my life by that. We continue, and the Ministry will lose patience first. I am a vampire. I can afford to wait.”

“What about me?” Harry whispered.

Draco met his eyes again. “I can afford to wait,” he repeated, and his voice had something horrible and beautiful at the end of it, something many-eyed and many-fanged.

Harry turned his cheek against Draco’s palm and stood there, and stood there, and if he had not known the morning was coming, when Draco would need to retreat and sleep, he would have stayed there for the rest of the night. As it was, he stepped back and laid a kiss on Draco’s palm in passing, something to burn and bless.

_I am strong enough to bear this. So is he._

That knowledge carried him back out the door again, and into the morning that always came.


	11. Serious, Now

 

“You will not do me the discourtesy of lying this time.”

Draco spoke his words with a drawl, because the only other option was to snap them, leap off the throne, and force Potter to the ground so that he wouldn’t walk, and that would hurt him further. So Draco lounged on the throne and barely opened his mouth to speak. Someone who did not know him well, or thought all his humanity abandoned for the beast, would not think he cared.

Potter knew him, and paused with one foot over the threshold of the throne room, his eyelashes fluttering. Then he sighed and moved further into the room, his head half-hanging as if he thought that would make his throat less attractive to Draco. Draco splayed his nails out to scratch flakes of stone from the chair arms and rose to his feet, movements his iron control still demanded.

“There’s no blood to smell,” Potter said, and limped carefully to the chair Draco kept for him. Draco thought for a moment of summoning Amelia and the others to bring a bed instead, but rejected the notion. Potter would misread the gesture, and Draco was not in the mood to spend time combatting his mistaken perceptions. “The Healers at St. Mungo’s cleared me for duty. I honestly thought you wouldn’t—I thought you wouldn’t care all that much, as long as I was here and surviving.”

Draco strolled down the steps off the dais, concentrating. His foot thumped on the stairs with more force than a human being’s, but not sufficient to crack the rock. His toenails, he knew if he drew off the soft shoes that protected his feet, would look like transparent talons, gleaming fit to rival moonlight. He could shear skin with those nails, as he could with the ones on his hands. He could tear through steel. He could bite out the throats of a dozen victims in a minute, if he did not give himself time to linger and taste the blood.

He focused on those things because it was easier to do than think about the fact that he could not protect Potter from himself.

“Potter,” he said quietly, and Potter cocked his head at him, smile faint and wearing out in lines around his eyes. “If you believed that I cared for nothing more than your survival, then you would not have looked at me as you did last time.”

“Damn,” Potter said, and leaned back on his chair. That movement seemed to jostle something inside him, and he winced. Draco crossed the distance between them, but ended up behind the chair, his hand resting on Potter’s shoulder. Potter turned his head so his cheek rested against Draco’s arm, and sighed. “There were times in the last month when I thought it was a dream,” he said at last. “Not the news I discovered or the way you refused to leave. But the—the rest of it.”

“Why?” Draco asked, bending down and exhaling into Potter’s hair. “Because everyone else tells you that vampires are not to be trusted, that you should find something else, someone else, to feed your fantasies?” He smiled, and tapped the edge of one fang against Potter’s earlobe, then had to stop. Even that close, the scent of the skin, the blood, the warmth, overwhelmed him. “Give me names. They will not say such things for long.”

“It wasn’t anything they did,” Potter said shortly, though the rush of blood through his veins faster than normal said that yes, there existed people who would tell him such things about Draco. Draco smiled, and thought of skin tearing. “It was something I did to myself. I’ve—I’ve been involved in situations this month that showed me an uglier side of myself, something I never thought I could do. I’ve learned that I’m not honest and honorable and all the rest of the rot that I try to sell people. I don’t know why I would be attractive to someone like you.” He whispered the last words.

Draco would have heard them if he stood on the other side of the world, if there was an ocean of blood between them. This time, he extended his tongue and licked the side of Potter’s neck. Potter went still, but not before he had turned his head slightly to the side, in an unmistakable gesture of welcome.

“You have stood in front of me,” Draco said. “You have killed for me. You have admitted that you try to treat vampires like humans when you can, and that you have fought legislation that aims to control my flock. If the position of negotiator was meant to punish you, you reacted against it by making sure that you took it over yourself and treated it seriously.” He brought his other hand into play, touching Harry’s other shoulder, massaging them as a way to force him to relax. Harry closed his eyes and tilted his head back, letting Draco do as he would. “I tried, once, before I thought about it as deeply as I should have, to claim you as mine. Your blood tastes good to me.”

Harry snorted weakly. “But a lot of people’s blood might taste good to you. You’re a _vampire_.”

“You think I have lost my sense of taste since I died?” Draco asked him, into his hair. “That is not true. In _any way_ I can think of. I would not take a lover who endangered myself or the flock, a lover who was not attractive, a lover whose blood was mere sustenance to me.” He touched Harry’s face beneath the eye with a single sharp nail, and Harry’s fingers came up and curled around _his_ finger, pressing indentations into Draco’s hard skin. Draco closed his eyes and hummed. “Now. Tell me what you did that convinced you of this.”

“You spend a lot of time telling me to tell you shit,” Harry mumbled. “Sometimes I think you say that more often than any other order combined.”

“If you would tell me what concerned you the moment you entered the room,” Draco murmured back, “I would not need to issue that order. And if you believe that your wounds are of less interest to me than attempts to attack my flock, I would say that the mistake is yours, and a sad one.”

Harry spent a few moments in silence, gathering his strength. Draco knew it was so, and did not press him to speak, but contented himself with learning the scent of Harry’s hair and the places on his scalp that made him murmur and turn his head.

“I went on a typical raid,” Harry said, his voice quiet. “We had all the information we should have needed about the people who were inside the building, how they were positioned, what they had done.” His voice slipped for a moment, and then recovered. “I was supposed to go in through the front doors—it was a small house with a large room on the ground floor where they’d knocked out all the walls—and I would have line of sight on the other Aurors as well as the Dark wizards.

“It started going wrong the instant we went in there. Someone used Peruvian Darkness Powder—and someone has to have a long talk with George about his _clients—_ ” He opened one eye so he could catch Draco’s.

Draco smiled back, not minding the reference to his own use of the powder at all. The moment when he had let Death Eaters into Hogwarts seemed so long ago, belonging to a part of his life when he was still human, a part of his life before he discovered his appreciation for Harry.

“And we couldn’t fucking _see_.” Potter’s voice descended. “I cast a _Lumos_ , but that only goes so far in powder like that. I heard people blundering and cursing, and I recognized some of them by their voices, but the criminals weren’t cursing, they were trying to slip away as fast as they possibly could.

“I heard someone scream, then. Not Ron—another Auror, Hawthorn, a bloke who might make something of himself one day, if he survives this. Last I knew, he was in hospital and still trying to recover use of his limbs.” Harry tensed up again.

Draco leaned down and rested his cheek on Harry’s hair, heavily enough to drive him into the chair. It was a less violent response than he might have showed when Harry expressed concern about someone else, and he hoped Harry understood that.

Harry seemed to take the hint, since he reached up and rested a hand on Draco’s temple before continuing. “So. Um. I cast a spell that cleared away some of the Darkness Powder, and I saw Hawthorn down in the middle of it all with a spell that was eating away his nerves. Standing over him was one of the Dark wizards who’d been—God, it sounds so stupid to talk about it now—changing people into animals that they could sell at high prices.

“She looked at me, and she smiled. She was torturing Hawthorn to death right in front of me, and she _smiled_. I—Draco, I set her on fire.”

Draco purred at him. “Perhaps it is because fire would consume me quickly instead of slowly, but that does not seem like such a horrible way to die.”

Harry shook his head, nearly hard enough to dislodge Draco. Draco held him down again. If this was the only way he could embrace Harry for the moment, then he would take it. Harry would, sooner or later, calm down enough that Draco could hold him more easily. “Tell me what happened,” he said, closer to a question this time.

Harry gave a dutiful chuckle before he closed his eyes, and Draco could almost feel the currents dancing in his brain as he sought for the words. “Draco, it was—it was horrible. Burning isn’t a quick way to die for humans. It’s horribly painful. And I followed her. I kept the flames alive when she would have put them out. Then I—I hoisted her into the air and used her as a torch for everyone, to overcome the Darkness Powder and light up what they were doing. And I did all that before I even _thought_ of helping Hawthorn.”

He lapsed into silence. Draco stood with him and used the silence to listen to his blood, the rise and rush of it through his veins.

“Did the other Aurors recoil in horror?” Draco whispered at last, and he knew what answer those other Aurors should hope for, if Harry did not.

“All except Ron,” Harry said, and Draco shifted. Harry twisted around to look at him and added hastily, “Don’t hurt them. Please. They were right too. I wasn’t—I wasn’t sane right then, and I felt horrible afterwards.”

Draco moved around in front of the chair to kneel before Harry. Harry followed him with his eyes, his hands clenching and holding each other. Draco forced the fingers gently apart so that he could hold them smooth and flat on Harry’s knees, petting the knuckles and the skin in between. When that didn’t seem to distract Harry, he bowed his head and kissed them, pushing his tongue against the webs of Harry’s fingers. Harry relaxed with a small gasp.

“I do not think you are a horrible person,” Draco said. “I think you can be a killer. Violent in protection of those you determine need your protection. I am a predator myself, Harry. A killer. Did you think I would reject you because of that?”

Harry sat still. To his credit, he seemed to be thinking deeply. Draco let him think, but kept his fangs near Harry’s hands. Now and then, he turned his head to the side so that one or the other fang would brush, lightly, so lightly, against Harry’s skin. Test and temptation for him, reassurance for Harry that Draco still wanted him no matter what he had done.

“I—thought you might,” Harry said quietly. “Because I burned someone. Because that’s the way that a lot of people kill vampires.”

“Knowing that you can burn someone does not mean that you will burn _me_ ,” Draco said. “And I will not reject you unless you betray me or the flock. Now. What would make you turn against me?”

“If I discovered you drained a human who was unwilling to donate his blood to you, and it wasn’t an accident,” Harry said, after another few moments of thought, his voice thick and heavy.

“And nothing else?” Draco rose to his feet and reached out to lay his hand gently along the side of Harry’s neck. “Not if I killed someone else, someone who was violent to you or threatened you? Not if I ventured out to defend myself, to carry the war to the Ministry?”

Harry shook his head. Draco smiled and drew him to his feet this time, and bowed his head so that his mouth lay near Harry’s throat. He drew Harry’s head down a moment later, so his mouth was in the same position along Draco’s throat.

“This is how dominant vampires stand when they want to seal an alliance,” he said. “I don’t ask you to drink. I want you to stand like this with me.”

And Harry did, with his eyes closed and his breath rushing along. Draco closed his eyes and did much the same thing, with the absence of the breath. In that silence, Harry passed through grief and self-hatred and perhaps understood that there was absolute acceptance for him here, if he wanted it. Unflinching, that facing of what he was, that acknowledgment of his power and his gifts.

And Draco felt, and was, and had, the same thing.

 _There is nothing on earth that would make me yield this. Nothing that he_ would _ever do, even if he_ could.


	12. Blood Drawn

 

_It says something about you and your life when you only feel alive going into a vampire’s lair._

Harry shook his head and resisted the urge to mutter something to himself as he appeared in front of the mansion. He was sure that Malfoy would have a vampire on guard at the door, and those sharp ears would pick up his muttering and relay it to their master. Harry did not intend to lie, of course not, but there was a—a limit—to the weakness he wanted to show in front of Malfoy or his flock.

Sure enough, the female vampire he had seen several times opened the door and bowed to him. This time, she flowed back to her feet instead of holding the bow, perhaps because she seemed confident that he would actually pass her into the recesses of the house.

Harry gave her a smile and did so, trying not to feel the frigid aura that extended beyond her body. Not because it troubled him; he had stood much closer to Malfoy, who bore an iciness that was greater than hers.

No, he did it because that aura no longer troubled him, and it should. How it should.

Harry sighed, rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand, and moved on, walking through the shrouded corridors that he knew well enough by now to have navigated them blind. For a moment he pictured himself doing that as Draco’s mansion burned in a Ministry attack, and then shuddered. It was childish to tell himself that nothing would happen if he ceased to imagine it, but then, perhaps he was due some childishness after this week.

“You smell tired.”

Harry’s muscles barely tensed at the voice as he stepped into the throne room. Once, he would have snapped to life at the words, a rush of terror and rage ready to power his curses. But Draco could say almost anything now, and after last month, Harry thought he would accept it.

Then he looked up as he neared his chair, and went still.

A man knelt in front of Draco’s throne. From the warm tint to his skin and the way his chest heaved up and down, Harry knew he was alive. Draco had fisted one hand casually in the man’s hair, and had the other resting on the side of his neck as though seeking the pulse that Harry knew he could smell perfectly well.

Harry didn’t have Draco’s nose, but he could _see_ everything well, since the man was naked.

The second thought that flashed through his mind was to wonder about the willingness of the donor, the third to dismiss the second, because Draco _knew_ that draining someone unwilling would make Harry walk away from him. The first was, _It should have been me._

Draco lifted his head, his nostrils flaring apart, wider than they could go in a human nose. “I did not realize jealousy was so sweet a scent on you,” he whispered.

Harry bared his own teeth and made himself sit down in the chair. There was a reason for this. It was a test, or a plot, or a push of some kind. Harry would push back. “I assumed it would smell sour,” he said. “Like spoiled plums. Like someone else’s blood.” He made a show of leaning back in the chair and frowning as though he was having trouble remembering. “Or was that a lie, that claim of yours that you would never take a lover whose blood didn’t smell good to you?”

Draco smiled at him, or at least it seemed like it was a smile, with fangs fully revealed but mouth not gaping open. “When I take a lover, I’ll remember your words,” he said. “But that’s rather different than taking a meal, I think.” His hand in the man’s hair caressed it; the hand on the side of the man’s neck tilted as though he would tear open the skin with his nails instead of his fangs.

Harry made himself shrug and glance away as if bored. “Did you want the report on the Ministry now, or when you’re finished eating?” he asked.

“Oh, I always find it pleasant to conduct business over a meal,” Draco said, and pulled the man to his feet and over to the other side with main strength. The man endured it, doing no more than gasping. Harry wondered for a moment if he was drugged, or in such a trance state of fear that he no longer knew what was going on.

He rejected the idea a moment later. Draco wouldn’t want to drink the blood of someone drugged, in case it affected his own reflexes.

And the man was too flushed, and, as Harry could see from the way his legs shifted and parted, hard to care much about what was done to him as long as he got the fangs. Likely.

Harry looked up at the ceiling and cleared his throat. “The Wizengamot shot down two new laws proposed this week,” he began. “The Minister wanted to make drinking donated blood illegal, but the Wizengamot preferred that to the rampage we would undoubtedly have if registered vampires couldn’t eat—”

“Harry.”

The voice floated over to him, curled around him, danced around his senses and muffled them, like a veil made of dust. Harry took a deep breath, and drew in the smell of copper.

“Look at me,” Draco said, and stretched the words somehow, in a way that Harry couldn’t define, until they were draped around him like strings of candyfloss. “Tell me that you can endure this.”

Harry turned back at the same moment as Draco’s fangs flashed, first white, then crimson. The man he held tilted his head back and voiced a long, wavering moan that collapsed into silence at the same moment as Draco began to suck.

Harry watched. And Draco watched him back, his eyes never moving from Harry’s even as his hands guided the man’s head back and the throat closer to his mouth, even as one of his hands slid down and pumped the man’s erection.

Harry swallowed. He understood what this test was about, now. Draco was showing him how he fed, what he went through and how he drank, and the teeth and the claws and the blood of it. If Harry could not endure that, he would have a miserable time trying to have—

_What? You know you’re not in love with him. You can’t call it love. Hermione would be horrified._

Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing hysterically. It seemed strange to sit here watching Draco drink from someone else and thinking about Hermione.

And because it was so strange, he let the thoughts fade and watched as Draco stroked the other man, and the way the muscles in his neck corded, and the lash of his tongue as he pulled his head back and clotted the blood, and the way his arms hardly bent when the man bucked against him in climax.

The man slid to the floor. Draco gestured, and the female vampire who had attended Harry at the door rushed in, silently snatched the donor, and carried him out again as though he was a child.

Draco sidled down from the throne. Harry thought it was the most normal he had ever seen Draco look when descending the steps of the dais, the most human, despite the strength the blood must have lent to his limbs, and he rose to his feet to meet him.

Draco laid one hand on his shoulder. The other strayed along the side of his neck, nails lightly scratching where they could tear, and at first Harry couldn’t figure out what Draco wanted. Then his breath caught, and he swallowed. _Of course. This is the way he touched the man just before he drank from him._

“Do you think,” Draco whispered to him, “that you could do such a thing? And could you stand to see me drink from others when you were dazed and could not sustain it? Because such things would happen. Especially in a war.”

Harry didn’t ask who their war would be against. He knew. He pulled in a ragged breath and then shook his head. “I don’t know. Watching you do that nearly made me sick from jealousy. Someone else having that, someone else having _you_ …I don’t know.”

Draco paused, and his eyebrows, which sometimes looked as if they were painted on his face, crept up towards his hairline. “How strange. Most people, I think, would describe that as _me_ having _him_ , not the other way around.”

Harry thought for a moment of asking the man’s name, but he wasn’t really interested, and Draco, from the faint smile on his face, knew it. “I don’t,” Harry said. “I want you, and I want to have you, and I don’t want something like that happening.” He knew he was speaking too rapidly, knew that he was throwing the words away that he had planned to save and hoard and look at like Galleons in the darkness sometimes, and he didn’t care. “Do you have to feed every night? If you spaced it out, and fed well enough, and carefully enough, then I could be the one who sustained you. Even in a war.”

Draco stood there, with that complete and utter stillness that no human could mimic, and met Harry’s eyes. Harry panted back at him, with no name for the emotion that swelled like tears in his eyes or thickness in his throat. He clenched his teeth when he would have asked, he locked his tongue in place when he would have named it, and he waited.

Draco nodded, at last, a long, languid motion that looked like the scrape of a polar bear’s paw across ice. “I could ration the blood, even yours,” he said. “My control is not perfect, but you have tested it and made it stronger than it has ever been. With you to teach me, I could learn to hold back.”

“From others,” Harry said, and pressed against a fragile, yielding barrier like cloth of silver between them. “From all others.”

Draco’s other eyebrow rose to join the first. He leaned forwards and breathed across Harry’s face as if he was exhaling across a mirror. Harry pressed another step closer, and another, and now his forehead, bone covered with skin, rested against Draco’s, which felt like marble sheathed in lace.

“You ask,” Draco said, his voice a trailing noise.

“I do,” Harry said, and reached up. His hands hovered opposite Draco’s, mirroring their presence. He could move them forwards and touch Draco’s, he knew, those dangerous, marble-colored claws and the pale skin across the palms, and Draco would accept them, receive them, as he had accepted and received every gesture Harry had made so far.

“I will give,” Draco said, “if you do something for me.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “Anything.” Because he really thought he could give anything, if Draco promised not to touch another human like that again after Harry was with him.

“Stay with me. Come away from the Ministry, and the life that makes you miserable, and stay with me.”

Harry closed his eyes and let his hands fall. Then he moved a step back and stood there, with the silence between them echoing like one of the corridors of Hogwarts after students had finished running down it.

“You won’t,” Draco said, and his voice was empty. Harry wondered if that was what his tomb had looked like, after he had risen from it. Or had he ever had a grave?

“I can’t,” Harry said, opening his eyes and swallowing, or trying to swallow, the huge ball of disappointment that had gathered at the base of his throat. “I—I could still do some good, if I stay in the outside world. If I come inside this world, then you lose your eyes in the Ministry.”

“I have some,” Draco breathed. “The spies who bring me word of most of the new laws before you come on the third of the month, and those people who long for the money or the pleasure we can offer and come to give us blood and words. What I do not have is you. What I want is you. Say you will come and be with me, forsaking all others, and I will forsake them, too.”

Pressure spiraled in on Harry, crushed and drove and ruined. He shut his eyes. He could have what he wanted, and he was sure that Draco wouldn’t prevent him from seeing his friends, at least not any more than the Auror work had done, lately. He would have what he wanted, and what he was growing convinced he would need in the end, anyway—

And the assault that he sometimes sensed growing around him, or thought he did, the rumors he hadn’t yet been able to track to their source, the people who shut up when he walked by, they might yet be able to destroy Draco and his flock.

“No,” he said, forcing his eyes open against what held them shut. “Not yet. When—when I can. When you’re safe.”

“The last thing I am,” Draco said, “is _safe_.”

He reached out a hand and held it in front of Harry, but didn’t touch him. Harry appreciated the message of that, and managed to smile even as a paper-thin knife touched his heart.

“Not yet,” he repeated. “Did you hear the second word?”

“The one I hear most at the moment,” Draco said, watching him carefully, “is the first.”

In the end, Harry was the one who forced himself to turn away. He walked out of the mansion with his head high and his heart burning and beating and brooding in him. He _knew_ something was going to happen, although he didn’t know what yet. He knew that not all Draco’s spies would find it out. Or they might turn. Spies bought with blood and gold might turn the other way.

He would be there, when the wave broke, and he would shield Draco and his flock from it in the way that only a powerful human Auror could.

Pleasure was not stronger than duty.

_Not yet._

It did not occur to him, until he was out of the mansion and on the starry, dusty street, that Draco’s feasting in front of him might have been not only scolding and test, but temptation.

And Harry only closed his eyes and shook his head when he realized it, slightly smiling.

 


	13. Blue Moon

Potter came late on the night of the third, past midnight.

Draco sat on the throne, this time with one leg crossed over the other and his face worked into a remote mask. He had the leashes of the flock in his mind, but slack, like the leashes of tame dogs. He had fed them recently, on blood so thick and tempting that he didn’t think they would raise their heads and sniff when Potter wandered through the corridors.

He had not fed himself. He did not want to. Dominant vampires needed more blood when they did feed, but they could endure starvation longer.

And while he _could_ still drink from the throats of others, they tasted less pleasant now. More metallic. He knew some humans would laugh at that, would say that the basis of all blood was copper and iron, and Draco must have something wrong with his tongue if he hadn’t noticed that before this.

He knew what they would say. He also didn’t care. He sat on his throne and waited, and heard the echoing footsteps of Potter as he came through the dim rooms, all lights extinguished. He didn’t move the less gracefully for all that, Draco noted, and he didn’t need a guide.

Potter came into the throne room, and became Harry. Draco wondered if he noticed that transformation himself, noticed the way a weight of water seemed to rush silently off him, as though the entrance of the room bore a cleansing waterfall. Harry lifted his head and found Draco’s eyes and smiled a little.

The first impulse to leap on him and bear him to the ground flashed through Draco’s mind like lightning. The thunder of his self-control followed. He kept still and nodded, but he knew he would need to feed after this, before the end of tonight.

There was only one person’s blood he wanted, but he could not have it right now.

“Lord Malfoy,” Harry said. Light movements, no attempt to bare his throat or hide it, although he bowed as he came near the throne. The news must be good, then. Draco allowed himself one sniff of the magic and the blood and the emotion, and then dulled his senses again. “You know the Wizengamot defeated another attempt to make donating blood for vampires illegal yesterday? Hermione gave testimony about how it would hurt human-vampire relations more than it would help.”

Draco raised his own head. Harry fell silent and blinked at him. He was enough in tune with Draco to notice that he was upset, then. Good.

“I want to know who is behind this,” Draco said. He saw the shapes Harry’s hands cut into the air, and knew they should have made those shapes against his skin, instead. He bit his own lip, and his tongue licked up his own sluggish blood, which was so poor a substitute that he resolved never to try again. “Who hates vampires enough to keep trying to pass these laws, whether or not they succeed.”

Harry sighed and pushed his fringe away from his forehead, but not as hopelessly as he would have done it last month. He was fitting more and more back into the human world, Draco thought. More hopeful about the state of the Ministry’s politics.

More distant from him.

“I know,” Harry said. “I keep investigating, but every one leads to chains of dead ends. I have specific names, like the name of the person who attacked me, but either it’s someone who’s so far up in the Ministry that they can arrange for others to take the fall, or someone tampers with the paperwork. I think it’s a combination of those two ideas, and definitely more than one person working on it.”

Draco hardly heard the last words for the buzzing that had taken over his ears. He cocked his head. “You said that only me draining an unwilling donor could cause you to turn away from me,” he whispered.

Harry looked as though he wished Draco hadn’t remembered those words. “Yeah?”

Draco slid down the stairs to the second one. He was crouched there, and his muscles were shifting and flowing back and forth, and Harry was watching him with parted lips and slightly extended tongue, before Draco began to think that perhaps he was going faster than he’d meant to, that he should wait.

“You said that only that could make you turn away from me,” Draco said, his voice lowering. He would test, now. He would see how close Harry was to him and how close to the human world he had been leaving behind. “So. I want the name of the person who tried to attack you, the person you concealed from me. I am going to harm him for daring to harm someone who is mine.”

Harry’s mouth opened further, like a horse testing a bit. Then he swallowed and said, “You said harm. Not kill.”

Draco hummed and bobbed his head. His body was alive with lightning like a strung wire, from one end to the other. His hands and feet were alien beneath him, like the feet of a four-legged animal. All he could see was black and green and red and pink, the colors of Harry’s hair and eyes and throat and skin.

“You survived,” he said, when he realized Harry was waiting for an answer from him and wouldn’t speak again until he had one. “That means that he should survive, too. Not well, not without pain, but I will only harm him, and not kill him.”

Harry gave a full-body shiver. Draco enjoyed it, and stuck out his tongue and dug his fingernails into the stone beneath him so that he might enjoy it even more.

“You like that,” he said. “You like the notion of someone fighting for you, killing for you. You like it more than you can let anyone else possibly understand. But I understand, don’t I? You’re at home here.”

Harry swallowed and nodded. “And I always forget how at home I am here until I come back,” he whispered.

Draco tossed his head up, but made himself hold back the snarled curses he would have liked to give forth. “That’s what your words were about,” he murmured. “You would have liked to fit yourself back into the human world, and ignore what happens between us here. You thought you could get away from me.”

Harry nodded. “I told you once before. Sometimes it seems like a dream. And I think this time—you convinced me it would be better if I could forget how jealous I was when you bit—him.”

Draco smiled and slid down another step. Harry had never asked for the man’s name, which was unlike him. Draco wondered if he realized how unlike. Harry didn’t want to know the name of his rival, which was fine with Draco, because he wasn’t sure he would remember it, anyway. But he hadn’t made the logical connection after that, that he wanted Draco for as many reasons as Draco wanted him.

_Or perhaps he’s so used to having to deny his own desires that he doesn’t even notice when he does it anymore._

“You can have what you need,” Draco said. “I did that as a test to see how you would react to me drinking. It was not only to make you jealous.”

“But some of it was?” Harry looked as if he didn’t know what to do with the answer to that question, no matter what it would be.

“Of course.” Draco melted to his feet and took a long step forwards. “So. Now we know what the problem is, how you distract yourself from me and start thinking things should be different or you should escape from me. What do you feel now? Do you want to escape from me? Do you think going back out into the air would clear your head?”

Harry’s face changed again, and this time, Draco could see the desire more clearly than he had at any other time. His hunger roared at the bottom of his dry throat. It seemed that seeing the emotion was better than smelling it.

“No,” Draco said, and laughed softly. “But you _think_ you should want to escape. You don’t know how I’ve succeeded in enchanting you so thoroughly. You want to hate me, and you can’t. It frustrates you, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does.” Harry’s voice was low. “I’ve never felt like this. I don’t know if something has changed, and that means I should be wary of it, or if I—if I could have felt this way in the past, and never did. That makes me want to berate myself for how much I could have missed.”

Draco came off the last of the steps and reached Harry’s side. “Don’t think about the past,” he said. “Don’t think about lovers you could have had. Come with me. Come to me. Stay with me.”

Harry this time braced himself as if to resist the pull of a rope. “I can’t,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Why not?” Draco let his voice curl around Harry the way he would have used a hand on his arm. “What is there for you back in the Ministry? They tried to punish you by sending you here as negotiator. They tried to kill you. The other Aurors fear your strength, your magic, everything that makes you what you are.”

“Not Ron.” Harry opened his eyes, and they were deep wells of light. Draco reached out and brushed one nail through Harry’s eyelashes, so gently they never blinked. “He doesn’t fear me.”

“I would let you visit,” Draco said quietly. “This is not exile, only sanctuary from the people who hate you, who refuse to understand you.”

“I would still like to find out who's behind this,” Harry said, and gave him a faint smile. “I know he tried to kill me, but I still don’t know who put him up to it, and why. He’s—somebody I don’t think would have needed the bribe they could have offered him, being rich enough on his own.”

“Then stay in the Ministry, for now,” Draco whispered to him, his hands curling around Harry’s neck. “But give me the name.”

Harry hesitated one more time, as though bidding farewell to something—his innocence, the person he had been, Draco didn’t know and didn’t care. The important part was that he had the name, when Harry leaned close and breathed it into his ear. “Terence Jayles.”

Draco licked his ear in response, and Harry shivered and bit off the moan that wanted to make its way out. Draco stroked his side, his nails sliding up and down, creating small rents in the cloth but not touching the skin beneath.

He was starving. He wanted—

Not to drink from Harry’s throat. Not yet. Not if he would go back to the Ministry and someone might notice the marks of a vampire’s fangs.

But he wanted, and he stepped back, and said, “Will you cut your wrist and give me a gift of your blood? Three swallows only.”

Harry went still. Then he said, “The marks—no, wait, there wouldn’t be any marks if I cut my wrist and you didn’t use your fangs.” He smiled as if embarrassed to have forgotten that, but his eyes were brighter than ever, and he was trembling, his hands clenched into fists on his stomach. Then he drew his breath in and nodded.

Draco slid closer to him, and stood there, fingers hovering a distance from his body, as Harry murmured a spell to give his wand an edge and turned his left hand over. The sharp wand slid across the vein. The skin split.

The blood came forth.

Draco kept his promise, but it was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, although it did tremble on an exquisite edge of temptation and he _had_ asked for it. He curved his fingers gently around Harry’s wrist and held it to his mouth, and swallowed once, the first time.

The blood burned his tongue. It burned his throat. It filled his body with flaming, fiery life, turning his veins inside out, making his heart beat so hard that he was afraid for a moment the rotted organ would burst. Draco licked his lips to make sure the heat was gone before he drank again.

The second swallow, and it increased the fire, and made him hard. Draco swayed forwards and rubbed gently against Harry’s hip, while the blood made his body sing. He could hear distant, thin, high sounds, and felt shimmering warmth light up his skin. Yes. It was like sunlight. Draco could see the light when he turned his head, and there was peace in his body, where he had thought there would be only riot, only violence.

No, the violence came with the third swallow. Draco took his claws from Harry’s wrist before it began, which was a good thing, because otherwise he would have cut him open and perhaps not stopped until he was inside him in every way.

This blood was pure desire, pure wanting, pure _lack,_ cutting his body in half, splitting him open, making him long to split open, making him long to fuck, to hold, to gaze into green eyes, to dance through fire, because it could not destroy him when he was feeling like this. He shouted, and the roar made the leashes in his mind tremble, but brought no vampires running, because he didn’t want them to come.

He wanted Harry to come, of course, and for a moment, when he looked at him and saw the way his eyes shone and the way one hand was balled at his groin, he thought he would.

Harry snapped his eyes shut and moved a step away. Draco waited, swaying, waiting to see whether Harry would break his own promise and come to him, come _for_ him, come back to him, this early.

In the end, Harry whispered, “Until next month. I am going to have the names by then, or else--or else I'll stay. Do with Jayles what you want.” And he walked out of the mansion.

Draco shut his eyes and seized his body in a grip as strong as the reaction Harry’s blood had given him. He had fed. Harry’s blood was enough to sustain him until the next month, when there would be…a reckoning.

He didn’t come, although he could have, with a touch. He would leave that up to Harry. He wanted to come with and for Harry, not apart.

_We will be with each other. He will see. He will choose._

 


	14. The Ministry's Enemy

Harry Apparated into place before the mansion and sagged against the door, panting. He had one moment to hope that the wards on the place recognized him, and then another curse shot past him and splintered the wood where his hand rested. Harry swore and pounded on it, hearing the strange, nearly-soundless glide of vampire feet inside. Draco’s servants were coming, but he didn’t know that it would be fast enough.

“Come _on!_ ” he shouted, as another curse hit the Shield Charm around his body and nearly cracked it. Harry’s magic was strong enough to hold off half a dozen other people, but they had been hitting him and chasing him for more than an hour, and his exhaustion—not to mention the cracked ribs and the spell that had nearly filled one lung with fluid before he caught on—was telling against him.

The door swung open.

Harry stepped to the side and then around, blocking a fire curse from one of his pursuers that could have burned Draco’s door guard. Some of it got through his protections, and he shut his eyes and tried not to whimper as the pain scraped at his senses. He didn’t want the guard to get in trouble for something that had happened to him, something that _wouldn’t_ have happened if he had been smart and gone back to Draco’s protection the instant he learned the relevant names, instead of waiting for the third of the month to throw off suspicion.

He hadn’t “thrown off suspicion” so much as “stepped straight into their perfectly-executed assassination plot.”

“Potter.”

Merlin God, it was _Draco_ behind him, his arms cradling Harry around the chest, pressing delicately on the broken ribs as if he wanted to bind them with bandages, his cold breath on Harry’s throat. Harry turned his head and tried not to moan. His body _did_ pick inappropriate times to get aroused by the vampire he would take as his lover.

If they survived this night to take lovers or worry about it at all, that was.

“Get _down_ ,” he hissed, and kicked Draco’s legs back behind him as another curse howled at them. A mixture of fire and plasma, this one, relying on imitating the surface of the sun. Harry desperately performed the countercurse, but still felt the sharp burn on the side of his hand, like the bite of an animal with one, deadly tooth. “You’re the one they’re after, the one they were after all along. I was just a distraction, and they played me beautifully, and I’m not letting them assassinate you when they’ve tried so hard to do just that—”

Draco’s hand took his shoulder, and then he turned, with strength that Harry couldn’t resist any more than he could an ocean wave, and pushed him into the house. “You are hurt,” he said, and his nostrils were flaring wide when Harry looked at him, the bones of his face pushing against his skin as if they would burst through. “Someone else has drawn your blood.” His hand found the side of Harry’s throat and tightened. “The blood that belongs to _me_.”

“Look, it’s not like they _meant_ to take my blood away from you, it’s more like they wanted to take you away from me—”

Draco smiled at him, and Harry fell silent. He knew it was a smile, but even he had to fight the shudder of fear that rang down his spine at the sight of those fangs, bright and long, and sprouting longer as Harry watched them, curved like the teeth of a skeletal tiger Harry had seen once in a Muggle museum. Draco scratched Harry's shoulder once with a nail and pulled his hand back with a single drop of blood gleaming bright there.

“I have your permission?” he asked Harry, holding his tongue out towards his finger.

Harry wanted to say that it looked like Draco didn’t _have_ to have his permission, given that he’d already stolen his blood anyway, but Draco’s eyes gleamed at him, and Harry’s breath came short, and he ripped his head up and down in a clumsy nod. Draco nodded back, and touched his finger with his tongue.

There seemed to be a silent explosion of heat and light—no, not light, something the reverse of light. Harry saw Draco’s hair stir as at the flight of a wind no one else felt, and then he turned and faced the street. His mouth opened further, his tongue lapping out and over the fangs, and then he roared.

Harry felt his chest shudder, and he took a step backwards before he could stop himself. That was worse than any roar of lion or tiger or crocodile he’d heard—and he’d heard a variety before, given how weird the Auror job could get. This was the roar of something that, he knew instinctively, hunted humans. The shouting of his pursuers in the streets fell silent for a moment.

And into that silence, Draco leaped.

Harry had known, vaguely, that his notions of protecting Draco were wrong before this, at least when he saw the damage Draco had wrought on the body of Terence Jayles: every wound Harry had suffered from his attack, replicated exactly, but exactly twice as bad, one of the hushed Healers had told Harry. But knowing it and seeing it happen were different things.

Harry’s attackers came out of the shadows when they had hidden at the sight of Draco. He was their prime target, after all. All six were Aurors, all known to Harry, and two of them in his year at Hogwarts. He sneered in spite of how much he hurt and how terrified he was at the sight of Michael Corner and Daphne Greengrass. They’d spoken to him gently and sympathetically about his assignment as the vampire flock’s negotiator in the last month, before he learned who they were. Talk about betrayal.

All of them cast curses combining sunlight and fire at Draco. It would have slaughtered an ordinary vampire in an instant. Harry knew that much.

Not Lord Malfoy.

He was never where the curses were, dancing among them in a series of flickering afterimages, his motions like a great mantis’s. One moment his arms curled out almost tenderly around Greengrass, and the next moment he’d sliced her throat open and she was falling, the blood spraying Corner instead of Draco as he tried frantically to defend himself. For a moment, Harry was afraid that Corner had succeeded and he had sent Draco to his death, but Draco was rearing up from beneath Corner’s wand, twitching it contemptuously to the side to avoid the stream of flames, and using his fangs to slit Corner open from navel to neck. He fell, dying, and Draco kicked him in the ribs to finish the kill, driving the bones upwards and sideways and into his vital organs at the same moment.

That left four Aurors, who tried to fall together into a line. Harry tensed, sucking in a breath. He had seen that tactic destroy powerful enemies.

But Draco roared again, and the line fell apart in fear, as two of them tried to stand and two tried to flee. Draco grabbed the two who had stood and cracked their heads together, then did something elegant and horrible with his hands that, when he backed away and leaped over their bodies, left their necks entwined like ropes. He landed on the fleeing ones, and Harry saw him grip the neck of one of them and _pull_. The woman’s entire spinal column came out and dangled, dripping, from his hands.

Then he turned to the other man, and ripped his throat open, easing him to the ground. Harry could see him grimacing as he fed, but he kept on doing it.

The hot flare of jealousy that took him made him swallow back nausea. _Is my blood not good enough for him?_

But a moment later, he realized what was going on, and felt like a fool for objecting to it. Of course. Draco was making one of the cowardly Aurors into a vampire, one he could easily control and pull memories from. Anything Harry had not known about the attack or the conspiracy to kill Draco and his flock, Draco would make sure that he got from the man, whose name had been Banner.

Harry closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. He still felt pain, but the greatest panic, the one that said he had to get to Draco before someone silenced him and killed Draco while Polyjuiced as him, was past. He concentrated on casting the minor healing spells that he could for a few minutes before something growled in front of him and he opened his eyes.

He was aware of Banner as a dim, crouching shadow in the background, now the newest member of the flock. But he was most aware of Draco in front of him, shining like a star—and with the gravity of one. Harry leaned forwards.

“You are giving yourself to me?” Draco was held back on a leash of pure will so strong that Harry couldn’t see movement in his limbs or neck at all. Only his mouth moved, his fangs gleaming dully. They were too covered in blood to shine. But Harry didn’t care. He turned his head to the side and grinned at Draco over his shoulder.

“If you think you can handle me, _Lord_ Malfoy.”

Draco stalked towards him, one fluid step, and then another. Then he was _there_ , and his hands settled into place, iron bands, on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry relaxed against them, moaning a little, because for the first time, he didn’t have to worry about protecting Draco. Draco was just as strong as Harry was, just as good. He could protect himself. He could hold Harry up. Harry could trust his strength, to the point that Draco could cradle him against the burning of his ribs and not hurt him.

Draco whispered against his throat, a buzzing sound of need and desire. Harry couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t have to. He turned his head further in the direction that Draco needed him to go, and felt Draco’s fingers straighten out in his hair and pull. Harry felt a sharp thrill cut through him. Someone else was strong, like him. Someone else could catch him when he fell.

Then Draco’s fangs were there, seeming to nudge the skin of his throat aside rather than cut, and Harry forced himself to relax, even the inner barriers that kept him from falling under a vampire’s thrall. The bite might be painful if he didn’t.

It wasn’t a forcing, he found a moment later. He _was_ relaxed, and as the fangs sank in to the hilt in his neck, the pleasure began.

He was burning.

The pleasure wrapped around his body in a helix, flaming ropes that spread out from his throat and strangled out any other sensation. Harry drew in his breath, and the way his lungs moved was pure pleasure. His legs flexed as he leaned against Draco’s chest, and he whimpered from the result. He tried to lift his hands, and Draco restrained them, and _fuck_ , Harry would have tossed his head around as the orgasm began, except that Draco was holding it in place with his fangs, sucking intently.

The orgasm jolted through him, and then Harry screamed as it began _again_ , the sensations climbing through his body, but a much shorter climb than before, and centering in the blood that flowed out of his throat in a steady pull. Oh God, oh _God_ , he would die from this, he opened his mouth to scream Draco’s name but no breath passed his lips, and his heart pounded steadily, frantically, towards another climax, and his lungs labored, and he cried out soundlessly, and it was so good, and he let his head fall back further, as much as he could, to feel Draco’s hair against his skin, and the marble-like texture of his collarbone, oh, he was certainly good at playing a marble statue _now_ , and—

Then Draco’s hand fell between his legs, spread and straining as he gave himself, and Harry realized he was hard, which meant he hadn’t come yet, every orgasm he’d had so far was in his head, in his _blood_ , it was amazing, he remembered the way Draco had killed for him and cried out—

And Draco kissed him, and wrung him at the same time.

Harry screamed out into Draco’s scream, feeling him swallow it as he’d swallowed the blood. He tasted blood against his tongue, above and below, tasted pleasure there and copper and iron and dust, and between his legs there was blood and _pleasure_ and he felt so good and _please could it never stop._

It did stop, but not before it had nearly broken him, and he sagged boneless and quivering in Draco’s arms, and felt the wetness against his arse. Draco had come against him there. Harry laughed, not too breathless to be triumphant.

“You would laugh at something like this, yes,” Draco said, and his tongue scraped out and up and down Harry’s neck. “You _would_.”

“I would,” Harry echoed, and let his bloody lips kiss Draco’s neck. “And now, could you get me to a Healer? I think I might have broken something else.”

“Like me, one of my vampires retains his wizard skills, and he was a Healer,” Draco said, and lifted Harry easily. Harry felt himself held in such a way that his broken ribs gave him no trouble. He sighed and leaned his head on Draco’s shoulder.

“A human lover couldn’t do that,” he murmured sleepily. “Not this. Not carry me in the first place, not smell me so that he would know how to hold me so I wasn’t in pain.”

“You’re mine,” Draco said simply, and began to walk away from the door.

“And you’re mine,” Harry said, and linked his fingers into Draco’s collar to cement the claim, closing his eyes as he did.

The image of the dead Aurors in the street came to him, but he simply didn’t care. He was done with caring, with being the duty-bound, dedicated Auror who fought for the Ministry no matter how many times they set him up or tried to sit on him for the fame he’d never wanted.

He _had_ wanted someone to love him exclusively, to fight for him, to fight beside him, to kill for him, but he had suppressed that desire guiltily, because he wasn’t supposed to want people to die.

But now they had, and now he didn’t care. The Ministry had got what they wanted, driving Harry away from his job at last, making it impossible to for him to return.

But, far more importantly, Harry and Draco had what they wanted, too.


	15. Starting the Fire

Draco moved delicately through the rubble.

At Harry’s insistence, he had not destroyed the entire Ministry, though the rage in him and the magic in Harry would have been sufficient to do that (whatever Harry thought of the matter). He had, however, attacked the offices of Magical Law Enforcement and the Wizengamot members and destroyed the records, the notes, the memos, and the plans regarding his flock that they had down on paper. And since the Ministry couldn’t survive without putting half their thoughts down on paper, it was an effective way to ensure that the survivors would find it twice as difficult to strike back at him.

That there were going to be survivors was one of the things Harry was responsible for.

Draco smiled as he watched one woman crouched under a desk, moaning. Ah, yes, she was the one that Amelia had bitten, if the ragged wound at the edge of her collarbone was any indication. At Draco’s command, Amelia had not used the thrall to make the experience an enjoyable one for her. She would retain for the rest of her life, along with the marks of a vampire’s fangs, a vague terror, all the more frightening for the lack of specific memories.

There _were_ certain memories left behind, of course. The Ministry had started this in the first place because the thought of a vampire who retained his wizarding magic terrified them, but Draco found little use for his magic most of the time. Fangs and hardened muscles and grasping hands could do what wands could not, and they were all less breakable.

But for Harry, he had used his wand and the Pensieves that some of those he had bribed in the Ministry gave him, and the Pensieves stood ready and waiting, full of memories of the Aurors attacking Harry and sitting around in committee planning strikes at vampires who had never harmed them. The vampire who had called himself Banner when he was alive had proven more than useful.

The wizarding world would know who was responsible for this. And it was not Harry, who would have served out his days as a calm Auror if they had let him, or Draco, who would not have risked his flock in any strike like this normally. Draco was looking forward to reading the lies the Ministry would use to try and convince the wizarding world they were not at fault. Truly.

A hand fell on his shoulder. Draco turned his head and sniffed at the base of Harry’s neck, welcoming and acknowledging him, and flicked his tongue out. The marks of his fangs were on the other side of Harry’s throat, but it didn’t matter; his tongue was long enough to touch them. He felt them glow under his touch, briefly warm and a silver-white color that reminded him of his own hair in the mirror, when he could still use mirrors.

“Git,” Harry laughed, using a hand to push his tongue away. “Are we done here?” He looked around.

Draco watched his face, and saw the way his eyes watched the woman rocking under her desk, the other people lying half-drained and vulnerable under theirs, the burning papers, the crushed and smashed cabinets, the vampires prowling like great cats in circles and at diagonals and yawning now and then, displaying their scythe-like fangs. Perhaps his smile grew a little more fixed, a little more set. But he had made his choice, and he had asked certain things, and Draco had granted those. He leaned against Draco now, and Draco settled his arm about him, a weight of copper and lead that Harry wouldn’t shift, because he didn’t want to.

That was the most remarkable thing about all of this, the thing Draco had gained by waiting. Act earlier, and he might have had the taste of Harry’s blood in his mouth and the taste of regret in his mind, because Harry would not have accepted the domination that Draco wanted to force on him. Wait, and he had this: Harry standing under his touch, leaning into it, and his eyes still shining, not dull.

“Is there any reason to remain here?” he asked, and Harry’s eyes twitched to him. “To listen to them lament or curse you, to let them intrude on us?” He reached out and trailed a single finger down Harry’s shoulder to the elbow, and Harry closed his eyes and sighed out. He would make such noises now without prompting, because he wanted to make them, because Draco wanted to hear them.

They had taught each other multitudes of unspoken things, but the most conscious, Draco thought, was how to face desire.

“No,” Harry said at last. “I already spoke to Ron and told him to stay home this evening, and Hermione, too.” He hesitated, then added, “He hates what happened to me at the Ministry’s hands. But he hates—everything that happened to me.”

Draco let his own weight rest against Harry, because he could. The smell of the scars on Harry’s throat was like skin, and sweat, and blood. “They will understand in the end,” he murmured. “Granger is already making strides.”

Harry turned to answer him, and then paused when he saw the way Draco had his head tilted, so the edge of Harry’s scars came into view. He shook his head. “You don’t care about her,” he said. “Not enough to mention her in her own right.”

“I do not care about them,” Draco agreed, lifting his eyes back to Harry’s and taking his chin between thumb and forefinger, lifting Harry’s head until he stood taller than Draco. “Not ever, except as extensions of you.”

Harry half-closed his eyes and shivered. “You shouldn’t be able to say things that make me tremble like that,” he whispered. “You’re not supposed to be able to get inside my head like that.”

“I am in your head,” Draco said. “Your body, your blood. And I thought we had established a useful context for the word _should_.” The corner of his palm found the scars and pressed down.

“It can mean—what we want,” Harry said, and blinked, and then suddenly snapped open eyes full of brightness so he could look at Draco. “You know I hate it when you try to send me into a trance by doing that.”

“The trance only worked once.” Draco flicked his tongue out to lick the scars again, and Harry tapped it warningly with one finger before pulling back. “No, Harry. I merely wanted to know what we agreed about with respect to the word ‘should.’”

Harry sighed and responded, “It can mean what we want. We choose our duties, now. You chose to lead the flock, to gather them around you and dominate their minds, when you could have chosen to live solitary and never attract the Ministry’s attention. And I chose to come to you, when I could have chosen to run away and stop investigating and they probably would have left me alone.”

Although Draco privately doubted the likeliness of that last conclusion, that _was_ the part he had wanted Harry to remember. He nodded. “You deserve this, and I do, and we will _have_ it,” he said, and rested his hands on Harry’s shoulders as he moved around in front of him to kiss him. Harry’s tongue stung his fangs, and his lips burned. “You _should_ do what you want to do, after spending so much time serving others. That is the only reason for the word to apply to our lives.”

Harry caught his hand, and kissed the back of it. Draco closed his eyes and was aware of it: hard bones, stretched skin, sluggish blood. So different from the quickness, in all senses of the term, of the man in front of him.

But that was the contrast between them that made them the way they were and brought Draco to life nearly as much as Harry’s blood. He tightened his hand around Harry’s fingers, and Harry gasped slightly, and Draco had had enough of this place of burning and blame and terror. There was only one place he wanted to be right now.

He gathered Harry close in his arms, hearing him hum slightly as he tended to do when Draco held him like that, and Apparated them. They appeared in the throne room, and all around them was the silent light of torches and the darkness Draco had grown used to. He felt Harry raise his shoulders and bring them down, his breath escaping in a gentle hiss.

This time, he was the one who kissed Draco and bore him backwards and down, to the floor that would not cut Draco’s back, that was less hard than it. It was Harry who fell on him with hands and teeth and opened his clothing. Draco went loose and long-limbed to kick it off, and Harry crouched over him, using his wand to Vanish his own clothing. Draco reached out and canted one hand across his hip, watching.

Under his nails, the skin and the blood pulsed. The green eyes shone, and the scars were there: marks of fangs, Killing Curses, lockets, venom. Harry had survived them all, and come into this, come back to Draco.

Grown into himself, grown _towering_.

Draco kissed him, and kept his lips at Harry’s while his tongue flickered out and touched the scars again. This time, it made Harry growl, a low enough sound that Draco felt the throb in his stomach when he listened. Harry liked things about him like this, he had told Draco three days ago as they planned their assault on the Ministry, things that no human lover could do, things that reminded him Draco was someone _extraordinary_ for whom he had chosen to throw over his world.

Harry Potter would never have an ordinary, normal life. But he could admit to himself, and to Draco, at last, that he didn’t want one, that trying to have one would be false in and of itself.

Draco had been part of that realization.

He ran his nails over Harry’s shoulder, and Harry hissed and tossed his head back. The hisses melted into the edge of Parseltongue, melted into groans, melted back into words, as Draco let himself draw blood, a single scratch. He didn’t bring his hand to his mouth. He lay still, and let Harry fall back into himself, a long, long spiral down, before he blinked and looked straight at Draco with clear eyes.

“Bite me,” he said, and lay down on Draco’s chest as on a bed, his head lowered, his hair sweeping over Draco’s neck in a crisp, curling mass, and Draco smelled it and smelled iron and ivory and blood, and extended his fangs to touch the scars on Harry’s throat.

Harry arched, a flowing, sensual gesture that he would never have permitted himself when he was still part of the Ministry, and then tilted his head backwards in a single agile movement, so that he was the one who brought himself onto Draco’s fangs, who broke the skin. Draco made a sound that was sob or grunt or hiss, he didn’t know which, and then the blood was in his mouth.

He had tasted Harry’s blood more than once now, and it was not the first time, but it was overwhelming, crushing. It seized him and hurled him, and he was not the one in control here, though he knew someone else might think so, coming on him embedded in Harry like this. He raked Harry’s hips again with blunt claws, and sucked, and drew, and dragged, and was sucked, and drawn, and dragged. Harry’s lips parted and his eyes closed, and there was fire in Draco’s mouth, and weight whirled him under. He was drowning in the sea, fighting back to the looming waves high above him.

But he had no need to breathe, and in the throes of a feeding like this, he had no need of a sense of direction, either. There was nothing here but dazzle. Light, and more than light, burning darkness, the memories of their month together, the races and the challenges and the yelling into each other’s faces and the moment when Harry had bitten him back and Draco had gone hard in an instant from the sight of his own dull blood on Harry’s blunt teeth.

This was unstoppable, something he could not stand up to, something that had no use for him if he did not conform to it. He was part of it, and he was more, united with Harry, than he was alone in his own mind. Controlling other vampires could not compare to it. There, he could drown them if he wished. Here, it was swim or be drowned himself.

He drank, and drank, and reached down. Harry, yielding to the pleasure because he wanted to, opened his eyes and chuckled quietly as Draco’s nails scraped at his arse. Then he grabbed his wand, lying abandoned to the side, and cast another spell, this time one that made him relax, half-boneless. Draco extended his arm as he could his tongue, bones crackling under the skin, and found Harry’s hole with two fingers.

Harry bowed his head and huffed. Draco’s fingers sank deep. Harry was rocking on them in instants, chanting something muffled, half in Parseltongue, half in English. Draco shook his head, and brought his fangs free.

“You have to hold still,” he said, because he had said it before, and he liked Harry’s response.

“The hell I do,” Harry said, and leaned back, levering himself with grace and strength on his hands alone, placed on Draco’s hips. He dropped towards Draco’s cock, and Draco scrabbled to get it in place. Harry was not above bringing himself off and then walking away if Draco teased him too long or didn’t cooperate.

And then…

Then he was inside Harry, and he was weightless.

Harry closed his eyes above him, his face so bright with pleasure that it made Draco’s cock stir from that alone. Harry rocked, and sighed, and his sighs were deeper than before, pulled from somewhere inside him that Draco believed he didn’t show to anyone else. He jammed himself backwards, and rocked faster, and Draco felt the pleasure begin to splinter him, making him drive his hips into a rhythm that was Harry’s, not his own.

He tried to cling. He drove his fingernails into Harry’s skin, and extended his tongue to lap the blood dripping from the wounds dry. But the pleasure here was as intense as that he caused Harry when he drank. Harry opened one eye and smirked, then braced his feet against the floor and began to bounce. He couldn’t keep that up for long, as Draco knew from experience, but he didn’t need to.

Buried, buried inside, and Harry fucking himself in short smooth strokes, his breath making his chest move and shine with life, his eyes too brilliant to be comfortable, reminding Draco of the burning, killing sun…

It was too short, it always was, no matter how many times Draco did this or how many times Harry did this or how much time they spent together, Harry’s head was back and quivering and his legs were clenching down, and he came just from Draco inside him and licking him, and Draco was aware of a minor surge of pleasure at that before the greater pleasure came down and overwhelmed him.

Crushing him. He had spent the last seven years, since he was turned, learning to cope with being a vampire, and being powerful for once, instead of merely dreaming that he was, thanks to his father’s name. He had to relearn now how he could stand in awe of something and _allow_ himself to stand in awe, instead of trying to master it.

They lay together when it was done. Draco’s fingernails were sticky, and his stomach, and his tongue, and his cock. He listened to Harry’s heart, felt his skin, smelled his contentment.

Then Harry said, “We should try it upright next time.”

Draco nodded, and licked the side of his throat, and said nothing.

Harry propped himself up on one elbow and considered him speculatively. Draco wondered if he really thought that Draco wouldn’t want to have sex with him in whatever position he wanted, but his next words put paid to that.

“I won’t be all right with everything you do,” he said.

“But what I wanted to know,” Draco said, and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder to slit the air with a nail trailing down, “was what would make you turn away from me. Not what would make you argue with me.” He leaned nearer, until their eyes were near enough to intermingle lashes and their foreheads near enough that he could feel the heat from the oldest of Harry’s scars. “And you needn’t think I’ll be all right with everything _you_ do, either.”

For a moment, the tension held between them, bright and strong. Not brittle, Draco thought. Nothing they did together would ever be brittle again.

And then Harry smiled, and rolled off him onto the floor, conjuring a blanket for himself. “Good. I’m glad we understand each other.”

Draco lay still, his arm over Harry—Harry’s warmth the only blanket he needed—and waited for the coming of the day that would separate them, and the night that would rejoin them, and more and more on from that, night and day without end, forevermore, an endless series of meetings.

**The End.**


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